


Someplace Like Home

by squirenonny



Series: Voltron: Duality [3]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (it's not always great), ADHD Lance, AU, Additional Warnings in Chapter Notes, Autistic Keith, Autistic Pidge, Dissociation, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, F/M, Flashbacks, Found Family, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Hunk has GAD, I feel the need to repeat: s l o w b u r n klance, M/M, Matt and Shiro have PTSD, Multi, Nonbinary Pidge | Katie Holt, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sensory Overload, Slow Burn, These kids are all stressed and they cope as best they can, autistic shutdown, neurodiverse defenders of the universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-13
Updated: 2017-10-02
Packaged: 2018-09-07 18:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 30
Words: 370,295
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8811013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squirenonny/pseuds/squirenonny
Summary: Team Voltron is not in good shape. Matt's suffering the effects of Galra experimentation, Lance refuses to accept the presence of a Galra on the team, Allura's struggling to cope now that Shiro has taken his place as the black paladin--and unbeknownst to them the Galra have already begun to move against Earth.If the paladins don't get their act together soon, they're going to lose everything they hope to protect.[Season 2 of Voltron: Duality][COMPLETE]





	1. Returns

**Author's Note:**

> Just a head's up: this is the second main installment in the _Voltron: Duality_ series. You're going to want to read season one, _Another Word for Never_ and the side story _Mama Holt's Army_ before starting this one, or you're going to be completely lost.
> 
> If you want to chat about this fic (or about Voltron in general), you can find me on Tumblr at [squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com).
> 
> Enjoy the fic!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also, in case anyone missed it, the wonderful Wooster wrote a little interlude that fits nicely between _Another Word for Never_ and this one. [Go check it out if you have the chance!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10831152)

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1  
>  Dated five years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> The year is 9870 Imperial.
> 
> It has been nearly ten thousand years since Lord Zarkon came to power, casting down the old Altean dynasty. In that time, the Galra Empire has extended its borders to encompass more than four thousand inhabited solar systems across twelve hundred galaxies.
> 
> We are now stretched thin, and progress has slowed. Resources dwindle and ships fail, and so we the druids have created a new initiative we call CORE. Each of the three CORE research facilities exists to answer a different question. Lab 2 studies synthetic Quintessence. The druids of Lab 3 grow Balmera crystal analogues.
> 
> Here on Vel-17, at CORE Lab 1, our purpose is simple: to explore the effects of extended Quintessential deprivation on sentient beings; to identify variance in the progression of Quintessential starvation in different species; and to determine if its effects can be attenuated in the absence of naturally-occurring Quintessence.

* * *

“I know I said this before,” Lance said as he steered the Blue Lion toward Vel-17. “But I’m _really_ not sure we should be doing this.”

“What’s the matter?” asked Keith. “ _Scared?_ ”

Lance squeezed Blue’s controls so tight she growled a warning in the back of his mind. He wasn’t sure if she was telling him to calm down, or if she was just grumpy because _he_ was grumpy. He was running with the second option, because he didn't think calm was an option right now.

“Uh, _no_ ,” he said, keeping his voice light. “I’m not scared. _Pssh_. As if. I just don’t want to get back to the others and have Allura yell at me for doing something stupid.”

“Don’t worry,” said Pidge, who was flying point in their little three-man formation. “We’ll just blame it on Keith.”

Lance laughed and Keith scowled in the little box tucked away in the corner of Lance’s viewscreen. Keith had spent the first leg of their mission trying to keep his feed audio-only, but Pidge had modified the comm system so he couldn’t shut off the video. (Not that it would have mattered if he did. Twenty-four hours wasn’t enough time to forget the Galra who’d cheated his way onto their team.)

“Cool your jets, Chewbacca,” Lance said, switching over to short-range scanners as they neared their destination. “The grown-ups all adore you, so it’s not like they’re gonna kick you off the team for this. Hell, they’ll probably give you a medal for taking initiative.”

A faint growl came over the comms, and Lance was pretty sure it wasn’t Red. But all Keith said was, “Stop calling me that.”

“What, Chewbacca?” Lance asked, all innocence and charm.

“ _Yes._ ”

“Fine.” Lance gave an exaggerated shrug. “How about Wolverine? Leomon? Beast Boy? Nightcrawler? Or do you want to go back to Furbie?”

Keith was definitely growling now, his yellow eyes glowing like coals in his fuzzy purple face.

Lance grinned, silently daring Keith to say something. Fighting one battle with them didn’t make him a paladin, and as soon as Matt was back on his feet, Keith was a goner. The fact that he’d helped them form Voltron didn’t change anything. They may have all shared a mind, in a certain sense, but the link wasn’t without limits. So, sure, Keith had wanted to save the besieged planet of Berlou—not that Lance believed for a second there was no ulterior motive there—but he’d also kept his mind conspicuously distant from the rest of theirs. Almost like he had something to hide.

Allura and Coran didn’t see it. When Pidge had proposed hitting a Galra base for information on what they’d done to Matt, and Keith had offered his “expertise” with Galra computers, both Alteans had smiled at him like he was a cherubic little icon of paladin virtue. Lance had come because Hunk wanted to see Shay, Shiro refused to leave Matt’s side, and Allura didn’t seem to see the problem in leaving Pidge alone with a Galra.

“Okay, guys,” said Pidge. “We’re gonna have to circle back around to the whole naming issue.”

“There _is_ no issue! My name is Keith.”

Pidge ignored him. “Right now we need to focus on the information.”

“Fine.” Keith leaned on his thrusters and shot ahead of the other two. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Pidge took off after him, but Lance hung back. He wasn’t scared, exactly, but the last time they’d come to Vel-17 Lance had almost been eaten by space zombies, then got dropped on an undead planet halfway across the universe with no way to let his best friend know he was alive. Lance couldn’t do that to Hunk again. No way.

But the little isolated moon base they’d hit a couple hours ago didn’t have access to the research logs from Vel-17, where Matt had been held for almost a year. Pidge had made the executive decision to return to Vel-17, Keith had instantly agreed, and Lance wasn’t going to be the coward who ran away from a challenge. Though he had to admit it felt like a stroke of bad luck Pidge and Hunk had thought to salvage wormhole generators from the wrecked Galra fleet on Berlou. They wouldn’t have been able to come all the way out to Vel-17 without the castle-ship otherwise.

Well. No helping it now. Lance would just have to suck it up and hope the monsters were feeling a little less vicious today. They couldn’t have found much food or water down there in the last week, right? Maybe they were already dead.

Or maybe they were some kind of super-zombie that was basically immortal and ate people just for funsies.

“There,” Pidge said as Lance finally caught up with them. The prison complex lay below them, small and silent from above. Lance’s eyes went to the perfectly round hole in the center of the building, where walls and floor and dirt had been cleanly cut away. There had once been a tarp stretched across the hole in the roof, but it lay in tatters now, crumpled on the bottom of the crater near the newer, smaller hole. That was where Lance, Matt, and Allura had been right before the Galra experiments had drop-kicked them across the universe.

Lance checked the BLIP-tech sensors Pidge had installed in Blue. With all three lions helping, the scanners were able to identify three lifeforms inside the prison—faint signals, clustered together in the northern wing of the building. They seemed to shiver on the display, skittering around the prison complex like cockroaches on a sugar high.

“Keith, hold on,” said Pidge as the Red Lion headed for the surface.

“ _What?_ ” Keith snapped.

Lance scowled. “Nothing. Pidge was just, y’know, trying to keep you from getting vaporized by the monsters down there.” Red slowed, and Lance let Blue drift around to face her. “Look, you wanna go get yourself killed, I’m not gonna stop you. But you _do_ have one of my best friends’ lions at the moment, so maybe you could show a little common courtesy and keep her out of it.”

“We need to draw those things out into the open,” Pidge said swiftly, cutting off whatever Keith might have had to say in response. “I don’t want to risk destroying the computers.”

“Right.” Lance circled the prison once, worrying his lip as he scanned for movement. The place remained as dead as the rest of the planet, which was even more drab and depressing in daylight, all gray rock and colorless sky. There was no break in the clouds, which pressed down on Blue’s back like a physical weight, crushing her toward the creatures below.

After a moment, Lance retreated toward the Green Lion and blew out a long sigh.

“Okay, I give up. How do we draw them out?”

Pidge hesitated, which made Lance feel at least thirty percent better about not having any useful ideas. Eventually, they shrugged. “Make some noise?”

Lance didn’t need to ask what that meant. Or, well, he didn’t get a _chance_ to ask what that meant, because Pidge wheeled around and opened fire at almost the exact same moment they finished speaking. Green’s lasers burned stripes across Lance’s vision and kicked up a cloud of ashen dust and rock chips.

Lance pulled back on his controls, eyeing Pidge’s video feed warily. “Remind me who decided you were old enough to be trusted with death lasers?”

Pidge grinned. “Shut up and help me make a mess.”

* * *

Matt breathed a sigh of relief as the Balmera came into sight on the viewscreen. It had proved difficult to track down a moving Balmera; more so than Matt had anticipated when they’d set out from Berlou. Balmera were fast creatures when they wanted to be. Not as fast as a Voltron Lion, not even as fast as the castle-ship, but fast enough that by the time Coran and Allura had finished preparations, opened a wormhole for Pidge, Lance, and Keith, and opened another wormhole to the coordinates the Balmeran Elder, Mir, had sent, the Balmera was too far away to be picked up on the scanners.

Granted, it had been something like four hours between receiving the coordinates and jumping to them and, granted, Mir had warned them her people were rusty on navigating from the surface of a healthy Balmera—an ancient art, apparently, but one that hadn’t been needed since the Galra colonized the creature.

Still. The last two hours they’d spent getting new coordinates from Mir and chasing down the Balmera had seemed closer to two days with the way Matt was feeling. He knew a lot of it was probably the fact that he was now aware of the crystals growing throughout his body, but it seemed like he could hardly take a breath without jostling something.

Shiro sat on the edge of Matt’s chair, absent-mindedly rubbing Matt’s back. Most of his attention was on the bridge—Allura’s dais with its twin pillars, Coran’s control panel where he monitored their location, the long-range scanners, and the comms. Matt’s seat was behind the main controls, arranged in a ring with the other paladin stations.

Matt wasn’t honestly sure what the paladins stations were for. They each had a console that connected to the ship’s main computers, so Matt could monitor anything and everything in the castle, and he was pretty sure Pidge used their station to test programs they’d written, but as far as Matt was concerned, it was just a comfortable place to sit.

Sitting was good. Sitting didn’t aggravate the crystal grating against his hip or the persistent pain shooting through the scar below his left knee. He’d been sure there were more crystals there, it hurt so much, but he’d had Coran run another scan using the castle-ship’s scanners, and while there was a small cluster of crystals behind his kneecap, it was no more than anywhere else.

“What are you thinking about?” Matt asked Shiro, leaning back to look up at him. Just yesterday they’d both been fighting for the fate of an entire planet. Just yesterday, Matt had still been searching for Shiro, not knowing if he was dead or alive, or if he had joined Zarkon’s army.

He _had_ been fighting for the Galra, as it happened, but only so he could sabotage the war from the inside. Zarkon's army had been marching ever-outward, the heart of the fleet on a collision course with Earth. Thanks to Voltron, that fleet was now so much rubble, and Voltron's new allies were monitoring the area to make sure no new threats to Earth appeared.

With news of Matt’s condition, there hadn’t been much time for relaxation on Berlou, but Shiro had showered and changed out of the Galra armor he’d been wearing into an Altean jumpsuit Coran had found in storage. The nice thing about living in a castle built by shape-shifters was that most of the clothes adapted themselves to the wearer’s body. The black and yellow jumpsuit was made to look like a jacket and slacks, but the illusion was ruined somewhat by the way the fabric clung to Shiro’s muscles.

Not that Matt was complaining. He needed _something_ to distract him from the pain.

He realized he was staring and forced his eyes back to Shiro’s face—and found Shiro watching him, one eyebrow raised, his lips twisted into an exasperated smile. Matt stared back, pretending not to notice the flush creeping into his cheeks.

“Do I want to know what _you_ were thinking about?” Shiro asked softly, pushing the limits of Matt’s self-restraint. He smacked Shiro’s leg and shot a furtive glance at the others. Fortunately, Hunk had abandoned his station to go hover at Coran’s shoulder in hopes of talking to Shay. Not that he would put it that way, of course. Hunk was much too nice to be openly excited about returning to the Balmera, given the circumstances.

He still looked like he was willing to go out in Yellow and push the castle if it would get them to their destination any faster.

“I was thinking you’re an ass,” Matt said with a teasing grin. “Lucky for you you’re hot.”

It was Shiro’s turn to flush, which was adorable. Logically, there must have been a time when Shiro wasn’t built like a superhero, and apparently that time had been more recent that Matt would have guessed. Or maybe Shiro’s head was permanently stuck in the awkward pre-teen stage. Whatever the case, he seemed caught off guard any time Matt commented on his appearance.

Matt took pity on his maybe-kind of-almost boyfriend, intertwining their fingers and nodding at the holographic map display behind them. “Pretty impressive, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Shiro said. He tried not to gape at the Altean tech and the artistic lines of the architecture, but it didn’t really work. “I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s all so…”

“Shiny?” Matt suggested. “Futuristic?”

“Thoughtful,” Shiro said. “I mean, let’s face it. Galra ships are just as advanced as this, and they polish everything to a shine, too, but… that’s all they have. A floor, a ceiling, four walls, and you’re done. Maybe some mood lighting, some security cameras or whatever.”

He shook his head, smiling at the recessed ceiling over the hologram. Altean writing was etched into the metal around the edge of the circular space. If Matt focused, he could make the castle-ship’s translator convert the letters to English for him, but a crystal at his collarbone was throbbing now, so he forced a smile and focused on breathing normally.

“The Alteans cared about this place,” Shiro said. “It’s a nice change of pace.”

Smiling, Matt leaned his head against Shiro’s arm and closed his eyes. He hadn’t slept well last night because of the pain, and the day so far had passed in an exhausted haze broken only by sharper fits of pain.

Shiro went back to rubbing Matt’s back, the motion a comforting rhythm that threatened to put Matt to sleep.

“Making our final approach, Princess,” Coran called out. Matt forced his eyes open and watched the Balmera grow larger and larger. He could pick out motion on the surface near the massive bore-holes that had once formed Galra mines. Matt thought he recognized the one they landed next to, though that might have been the sleep deprivation talking.

When they landed, Matt had to work himself up to standing, his body aching like that of a much older man. Shiro’s hovering presence nearby was motivation enough to clamp down on his pain. He managed to stand on the first try, wavering only a little as vertigo threatened to overwhelm him.

 _Raw Quintessence,_ Allura had said. That was what Haggar’s druids had hit him with back on Berlou. Their normal, violent-tinted magic drained Quintessence from the victim, but the yellow lightning that had hit Matt during the battle was exactly the opposite. As far as Allura could tell, it was a weaponized form of the Quintessence they’d stolen, injected directly into Matt’s body. And considering the crystals inside him grew in response to Quintessence…

Well, it wasn’t all that surprising that Matt’s pain level had been so high since waking up in the Berlua medical clinic.

He tried not to lean too heavily on Shiro as they left the castle-ship, but it was preferable to collapsing at his feet. The elevator ride down to the main ramp was long and awkward. Allura and Shiro’s eyes on Matt’s head felt like needles under his skin, and the way Hunk and Coran conspicuously avoided staring was only marginally better.

Mir, Shay, and Rax greeted them at the base of the ramp.

“Welcome, paladins,” Mir said with a slight bow. “It is good to see you again, unfortunate though the circumstances may be.”

Matt forced a smile. “What, me? Nah, this was all just an excuse to let Hunk and Shay catch up.”

Shay giggled into her hand, Hunk scowled at Matt, blushing, and Mir’s eyes softened.

“Come,” she said, waving to Rax. “Let us take a look at you.”

Rax stepped forward, wringing his hands. “I will carry you—if you do not mind?”

Matt was seriously tempted to decline, but he honestly wasn't sure when his body would decide it had had enough. If he turned down Rax’s offer now, Shiro would probably end up carrying him at some point—and as much as he liked the idea of Shiro carrying him bridal-style, the thought of Shiro seeing him at his weakest tied his stomach in knots, and not in a good way.

So he nodded, doing his best to stay dignified as Rax lifted him, one long, rough-skinned arm at his knees, the other around his shoulder. As brusque as Rax had been on their first visit, he was surprisingly gentle now, careful to hold Matt steady so the journey didn’t jostle him too badly.

Allura and Mir took the lead, conversing softly about the progress the Balmerans had made in rebuilding after the generations-long Galra occupation. Coran was tactful enough to distract Shiro, who quickened his pace to keep up with Rax’s longer strides.

Shay, meanwhile, pulled Hunk to the back of the group with a soft, “Hello, Skyling.”

Matt met Hunk’s eyes over Rax’s shoulder and smiled, taking a guilty sort of pleasure in the way Hunk pouted and proceeded to ignore Matt’s gaze.

“Hey, uh, hi,” he said, staggering slightly as Shay bumped her shoulder against his. “I, uh, I told you we’d be back before you had time to miss us.”

Shay laughed. “You did. I must confess, I thought you were exaggerating.”

“Yeah, well, you underestimated Team Voltron’s thirst for danger.”

* * *

Keith waited out fifteen minutes of aimless shooting before he spoke up.

“Okay I don’t think this is working.”

Lance hunched over his controls. “I don’t think _you’re_ \--”

“No, Lance, he’s right.” Pidge gave up on blasting the landscape into oblivion and slumped in their seat. “I don’t think we’re gonna draw them out like this.”

“Are you sure they’re even down there?” Keith cringed as soon as the words were out of his mouth. He really needed to learn to think before he opened his mouth if he was ever going to make friends with the other paladins. “I just mean—some types of biolife sensors can give a false positive if there’s something recently dead in range. Or—or maybe those things _are_ still alive, but they’re too weak to move around.”

Keith’s gaze flickered to the visual feeds in the corner of the screen. Lance still looked like he wanted to drop-kick Keith into an active volcano, but Pidge’s face was neutral. That was something.

“You might be right,” Pidge conceded after a long moment. “But these things are _nasty_. I’m not going in there until I know for sure they aren’t waiting to ambush us or something.”

Keith should have left it alone. He should have just nodded and backed off and let the other two come up with a plan. But he’d already been alone with them—the two paladins who hated him the most—for nearly five hours. If this didn’t end soon, he was going to punch something.

“So, what, we just hang around up here forever?” Keith demanded.

Lance, of course, was not amused. “Hey, big shot, if you’ve got a better idea, I’m all ears, but if you just wanna complain, why don’t you do us all a favor and shut your cake hole.”

The Red Lion growled in Keith’s ear, every bit as fed-up with Lance’s attitude as Keith. That was some comfort, even if it didn’t keep his hands from shaking as he wheeled his lion around and split off from the others.

There was a moment of silence, and then both humans started talking at once.

“What are you doing?”

“Yeah, that’s what I _thought_. Go ahead and run, you overgrown chinchilla!”

“Lance… I don’t think he’s running away.”

Red touched down near the outer wall of the prison complex. “Pidge,” Keith grunted. “Am I anywhere near the main computer?”

Pidge hesitated. “You aren’t going _in_ there, are you?”

Keith grit his teeth, running his thumbs along the controls. Matt had lent him the red paladin’s armor, lightweight polymer plates over a bodysuit that was made of some kind of fabric Keith didn’t recognize, something thin enough that he could feel the rough texture of the throttle’s grip. He reminded himself to breathe. “Am I near the computers or not?”

“…No. They’re pretty much dead center of the building. But Keith--”

He didn’t let Pidge finish. Keith squeezed the trigger, and Red unleashed a low-power blast from her tail that blew a hole in the wall. It probably also took out three or four rooms on the other side, but it got him inside without wasting time. That was all Keith cared about right now.

Ignoring Pidge and Lance’s increasingly frantic protests, Keith lowered the ramp and jogged out into the stagnant Vellian air. Red’s presence in his mind was restless with the need for action, and he didn’t doubt that if she’d been small enough to fit in the prison complex’s corridors, she would have followed him over the rubble and into the darkened interior.

It was eerily silent inside the building. Keith fumbled with the buttons on the side of his helmet until he located the switch for the headlamp, which lit up the corridor with a soft yellow glow. Shadows stretched away from him into the darkness, sharp angles and stark contrast that made everything look surreal.

Lance was ranting in some language Keith’s translator didn’t recognize, which was actually something of a relief. It was much easier to tune out gibberish than barbed insults, and Keith needed to focus on finding the creatures the paladins had encountered the last time they were here. His face mask provided him with a readout of Red’s BLIP-tech scan, which grew more precise as Keith approached the source of the signal. His suit must have had its own scanner installed—but the signal was too faint for the scanner to pinpoint, even from here.

Navigating the building in the dark was difficult, even once he’d turned the comms down to near-nothingness and focused on building a map in his head. He’d spent his whole life in space, and surface structures had a logic all their own. There was no central corridor here, no symmetry to make navigation easier, and he kept finding himself at rooms with no other exits.

Eventually, though, he reached the area where the scanners placed the creatures. Slowing, Keith drew his sword and scanned the corridor as he progressed, looking for signs of movement.

His only warning was a solitary red light glowing at him from the darkness. Something scraped against the floor, and Keith leaped back, narrowly avoiding a clawed hand the size of his head. Yelping, Keith brought his sword up.

The blade bit into hardened flesh, stuck for a fraction of a second, and then turned aside. He smelled burning flesh and the acrid scent of blood, but the creature’s hand was still intact and fully functional, swiping again at Keith’s head as he retreated back the way he came.

With a rasping cry, a second creature joined the first, this one covered in a network of neural-dermal enhancements. Keith had never seen such an extensive application, but even a small fraction of this would have been enough to grant a noticeable uptick in agility and precision. As much as this creature had been augmented, Keith knew better than to engage it head-on.

He raised his sword to block a swing from the first creature, the one with the cybernetic eye, not unlike the one Sendak had used, then turned and ran. Pidge had said there were three creatures here, but they’d have to content themself with two, because Keith wasn’t hanging around to see if the missing test subject was still combat-ready.

Keith ran without slowing, letting the sound of claws on steel tell him when to dodge and when to risk a counter-strike. He tried to identify the species the test subjects had been before the experiments, but it wasn’t one he recognized—though the decomposing flesh wasn’t exactly doing him any favors.

The map he’d built in his head wavered in and out of focus as he ran. He didn’t have time to stop at intersections and debate, so he navigated on gut instinct. He was pretty sure he’d already gotten himself lost, but he could sense the Red Lion distantly, and that was as good as a compass for pointing him toward the exit.

The creature with the ND network lunged, and Keith wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid the blow. Two-inch claws glanced off his shoulder, leaving gouges in the armor there, and Keith staggered, lashing out with his sword as the creature skidded past him. He twisted, slashing at the other creature, then sprinted through the nearest door into a laboratory. The shelves on the walls were laden with glass jars containing indistinct specimens, but Keith didn’t stop to study them, just charged through the far door and turned left, back toward Red’s silent call.

He felt her getting closer with each breath, reaching out to him. He swung around a corner to the left, pushing his legs to move faster as the creatures skidded and slammed against the wall in their haste to follow him.

Sunlight bleached the corridor ahead, and Keith cranked up the volume on his comms.

“Coming out with two,” he cried. “Get ready!”

He stumbled on the mound of rubble, clawing his way up as the creatures grasped at his heels. The unsteady ground slowed him more than it seemed to slow the creatures, and their angry cries spurred him onward.

When he reached the top of the rubble heap he staggered forward and leaped for solid ground, landing awkwardly and pressing a hand to the earth to steady himself.

Something heavy shook the stone behind him.

Keith ran for all he was worth, but the creature was faster. It was going to catch him before he reached the Red Lion, it was--

A shadow swept over Keith, and he covered his head with his arms as wind and heat whipped around him.

The creature hissed, and something scraped against metal, the sound an assault on Keith’s adrenaline-sensitive ears.

He spun, ready for a fight, and found the Green Lion towering over him, pinning the creature with cybernetic eye beneath her front paw. Her tail arced up, shooting at the other creature, who dodged with uncanny speed.

The Blue Lion dropped from the sky in a swirl of wintery air. Ice crystals bloomed across the second creature's skin, rooted it to the ground. It fought a second longer, stretching its claws toward the Blue Lion, and then stilled, cocooned in a thick layer of ice. With a flick of her tail, Blue shattered the ice and the creature within.

Silence settled over Vel-17.

Keith braced his hands on his knees, drinking in deep lungfuls of air as his heartbeat returned to normal. He tugged off his helmet, letting the breeze of the Blue Lion’s passing cool his scalp. In retrospect, this probably hadn’t been his brightest plan ever. Though, on the bright side, it had taken care of two-thirds of their problem.

“Well,” Pidge said, the Green Lion leaning harder on the pinned creature until it stopped moving. “That was exciting.”

“Crazy,” Lance said, setting the Blue Lion down beside Green. “The word you’re looking for is crazy. Maybe _monumentally stupid._ ”

Both lions’ ramps lowered, and Pidge flashed Keith a grin as they came down. “Effective, though, you gotta admit.”

Lance groaned, refusing to even look at Keith as he headed for the hole in the wall. “Don’t encourage him, Pidge.”

Keith scowled at Lance’s retreating back until Pidge elbowed him.

“Ignore him,” they said in an undertone. “He’d have done the same thing if you hadn’t beat him to it.”

“Stop spreading lies about me, Pidge!” Lance paused atop the pile of rubble, hands on his hips like old propaganda recordings of explorers surveying new worlds. Somehow Keith doubted Lance would appreciate the comparison. “Don’t forget there’s still one of these things in there somewhere.”

Pidge rolled their eyes and hurried to catch up with Lance, Keith trailing several steps behind. “Thanks for the tip, O fearless leader. Wanna wait for the rest of us, or are you gonna solo this fight?”

Lance froze, turning to glare at Pidge, who smiled innocently and plunged past him into the darkness.

* * *

Rax carried Matt to a small chamber off one of the quieter sections of tunnel. Someone had strung a curtain up here to give a bit of privacy, but the miniature parade they’d attracted as they made their way through the tunnels ruined the illusion. Mir attempted to shoo them off, but many of the youngest Balmerans lingered, openly gaping at the paladins. Matt supposed it was only to be expected, after all Voltron had done for the people, but it still left him feeling self-conscious as Rax set him down on a carved stone bed covered in moss.

“I wish you well, Paladin,” Rax murmured, rubbing his arm. He seemed nervous, and Matt wished he had the brain power to comfort him.

Instead, he just smiled. “Thank you, Rax.”

Rax smiled, then turned toward a ripple in the curtain where several children were trying to sneak one final peak at the humans. With a sigh, Rax waved to his sister and grandmother and stormed out past the curtain. A chorus of squeals greeted him, followed by pounding footsteps.

With a playful roar, Rax gave chase. “What wicked ogres are these, spying on our guests? Exunt!” One of the children shrieked with laughter, and Rax grunted. Matt leaned over to peer through the gap in the curtains and saw Rax rubbing his jaw, one of the children draped over his shoulder. “You have a tough vein in you, little ogre. And hard feet.”

Hunk raised an eyebrow at Shay, who bit back a smile. “Fear not. My brother often watches the young ones while their parents work. He will not let them disturb us.”

“I’ll bet he’s one tough babysitter,” Hunk muttered, and Matt had to agree.

Mir smiled. “He is at that. Now.” She turned to Matt. “Take off your shirt.”

Matt flushed, but did as she asked, shrugging out of the long-sleeved red shirt Lance had sewn for him out of fabric he’d “borrowed” from spare bedrooms in the castle. Wadding up the shirt, Matt hugged it to his chest and stared at the floor as Mir and Shay stood behind him. The others waited by the doorway, an awkward silence growing between them as Mir laid one rough, warm hand against Matt’s back.

The heat sank into Matt’s aching muscles and he relaxed into the touch, though it didn’t last long.

When the heat faded, Mir breathed out, patting Matt’s shoulder. “Not to worry, young one,” she said. “These are indeed Balmera crystals growing within you. We should be able to ease your pain. Granddaughter?”

Shay grunted, and added her hand beside Mir’s. Matt didn’t have to ask to know when they’d started their work. It stirred something in him, some awareness that, though dampened by a flash of pain, left him feeling small and out of place. He was keenly aware that the stone he sat on grew from a living creature, that this entire world was alive. He couldn’t sense the Balmera, not the way he could sense his lion, but through Shay and Mir’s touch he could feel a vastness that left him dizzy and disoriented.

A moment later the crystals began to shift, and Matt forgot all about the Balmera and the two women behind him. The aches he’d just begun to get used to shifted, awakening fresh pain as they found new bones to grate against, new nerves that weren’t yet desensitized to their presence.

Matt hissed, and Shiro moved as though to stop the Balmerans. Allura held him back with a hand on his shoulder, and Matt sent her a silent thank-you. The pain was already receding, and his breath came easier. It was like letting out a breath he’d been holding too long, a release of tension he hadn’t even realized he’d been carrying around.

Mir and Shay continued their work on Matt’s back for several long minutes, Matt tracking the motion of the crystals by the pain and the nausea and the icy numbness that followed. When they’d finished, they moved on to his neck and limbs and gut and repeated the process. Sometimes they drew a crystal fragment out of his body through the skin, leaving small puncture wounds that oozed blood until Shay spread a cool, fragrant gel over them.

More often, no crystal appeared. Matt wasn’t sure if these shards were too large to extract, or too deep, or if they simply didn’t want to do them all at once. It hurt enough when they poked through the skin that Matt didn’t complain, but he didn’t relish the thought of going through this several more times, extracting a handful of crystals with each pass.

It was difficult to say how long it took, all together. Matt spend a good deal of the time only vaguely aware of the world around him, his mind floating somewhere outside his body in a typhoon of unpleasant sensations.

All he knew was that by the time Mir passed him a cup of warm broth filled with cave root and what was probably some kind of Balmeran insect, Hunk had flopped sideways on a stone bench carved into the wall, Coran was examining the jars stacked on the shelves at the back of the space, and Allura and Shiro were deep in conversation, their voices too soft for Matt to hear. Not that he made much of an effort. It felt like he’d just run a marathon, and all he wanted to do was sleep.

“Are you done?” he asked, yawning.

Hunk sat up, rubbing his eyes, and the others turned expectantly to Mir, who only frowned and tapped the bottom of Matt’s cup. She stared at him until he drank, grimacing as the cave bug chunks went down.

He had to take two more drinks before Mir was satisfied—and as soon as she started talking, he set the stew aside.

“We are done for today,” Mir said, frowning pointedly at Matt’s cup. “Your life is in no danger, and you need rest. We will speak when you awake.”

“But--”

“ _Rest_ ,” Mir said firmly. She nodded to Shay, who quietly ushered the others out beyond the curtain. “We will return.”

Before Matt could protest any further, they were all gone, and Matt was alone in the quiet alcove, his body growing heavy. He wondered with some irritation whether Mir had dosed the stew with a sedative, but he couldn’t find it in him to fight it. Within a few short minutes, he was deeply asleep.

* * *

“So… rebuilding seems to be going well.” Hunk shoved his hands into his pockets and kicked a loose rock underfoot. He and Shay were alone for the moment in one of the main tunnels, the others having scattered through the tunnels to help out with whatever small projects they could find. Shay had invited Hunk to help cook dinner for her family—which, as it turned out, included a good two dozen Balmerans. Apparently on the Balmera family had less to do with shared blood and more to do with shared work. Those who lived and worked in these tunnels were one family among about five hundred scattered across the Balmera.

Shay carried a bundle of dry, flaky rock chips on her back. She called them bark, and apparently they were flammable. Privately, Hunk thought they looked more like cow pies than tree bark, but hey. Whatever got the job done.

She smiled at a pair of Balmerans working in a side tunnel. They were replacing the haphazard supports the Galra had installed with newer, cleaner versions, and they paused every so often to lay a hand on the wall. Whether they were communicating with an overseer or checking on the Balmera itself was anyone’s guess, but they seemed cheerful enough.

“It comes along,” Shay agreed. They entered a larger chamber dotted with mossy beds and carved stone stools, and Shay set her bag of bark down by an empty fire pit. “Slowly, but it comes along. It will be many years before Balmera returns to her full glory, but we have already come a long way from what we were under the Galra.”

“That’s good to hear,” Hunk said, sitting beside her. Someone had already left a pile of cave roots and a jar of cave bugs by the pit, and under Shay’s instructions, Hunk got to work peeling the roots while Shay got the fire going.

Well… fire maybe wasn’t the best word. The bark glowed red like coals, and there was definitely heat coming off it, but there wasn’t an open flame, and it produced surprisingly little smoke. (Probably a good thing, considering they were in a cave half a mile underground.)

“And you?” Shay asked, once she deemed the fire good enough and turned her attention to the cave bugs. “Aside from this latest trouble, have you been well?”

“Eh.”

Shay turned a curious look on him, and he rubbed the back of his head. “I mean, we’ve saved a rebellion and a planet or two, but mostly it’s been run-for-your-life, fight-for-your-life, sabotage-a-giant-alien-space-gun-for-your-life.” He paused, mood lifting as Shay laughed. “Let no one ever say the life of a paladin is boring.”

“It sounds so.” Shay dumped a handful of cave bugs into a pot of water, and Hunk added the cave root he’d peeled and chopped. Some moss and little twiggy herbs followed, and Shay stirred the pot once before moving to another fire pit and beginning the process all over. “You have not been hurt too badly, I hope?”

This was about the point where Lance would have said something cheeky like, _Why? Worried about me?_

Hunk was not Lance. He felt himself blush just thinking the words, and he laughed self-consciously as he focused on his cave roots. “Nah, I’m good. Good as I’ll ever be.” He resisted the urge to check his pocket for the bottle containing his last Ativan. He’d managed nearly a month only needing to take one pill, which honestly was nothing short of a miracle. (If by _miracle_ you meant _constant_ _low-level anxiety about running out of his anxiety meds._ _)_

He’d have taken that last pill ages ago if he wasn’t ninety percent certain he wasn’t getting any more for the rest of the war. Minor panic attack now was better than major panic attack with Zarkon in the room. Or something.

“Oh, hey, yeah.” Hunk sat up straight. “I've been to more planets now. You'd like them, I think.”

“Oh?”

Hunk nodded, adjusting his grip on his knife as he switched from peeling to chopping. “Yeah. Wa’resha’s covered in trees that are, like, a thousand feet tall, and they have ferns the size of a Voltron Lion on all their skyscrapers—honest-to-god skyscrapers, though they look puny next to the trees. Oh, and on Berlou they’ve got this, like, non-Newtonian stone. Sand? Whatever. It’s light enough for the wind to blow it around like sand dunes, but it turns solid if you walk on it.” He paused. “Sorry, did that make any sense? I mean, you don’t have sand dunes here, and I’m sure you don’t know who Newton was.”

Shay just hummed distractedly, poking at the burning bark with a thin stone rod.

Hunk fell silent, watching her. “Is… something wrong, Shay?”

“Hm? Oh.” She shook her head, her earrings clacking as they bounced off her carapace. “My apologies. I did not mean to worry you. I am only thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing.” She dumped her cave bugs into the pot and stood, hoisting the rest of the rock bark. “Come. We have much stew yet to make if we are to feed my family.”

* * *

Lance was careful to keep an eye on Keith as he and Pidge got to work on the prison’s computers. It was getting harder and harder to find reasons not to trust Keith, but then, trust wasn’t really a _logical_ thing, was it? Lance had been dragged away from home, ripped apart from half his team, put through a blender, then shoved into battle with a Galra at his side. So, yeah, he was a little on edge.

It would have been easier to trust Keith if the guy wasn’t such an obnoxious, arrogant asshat all the time. Always trying to make Lance look stupid, rushing in places to look cool and hog all the glory. Keith was _not_ a team player, and Lance didn’t think it was fair for all the team-building to come from one side.

Pidge backing off the whole _you stole my brother’s lion_ thing only made it worse. They were still out here alone, with one of the Galra monsters unaccounted for, and Keith was doing god only knew what with the computers here. For all they knew, he could be calling in reinforcements.

Okay, sure, he could have done that well before now.

And, fine, he had legitimately risked his own neck to lure out those other two zombie-creatures.

It just…

Lance huffed, forcing his eyes back to the big, dark, open space he was supposed to be watching for signs of the last Galra monster. Pidge had insisted, even though Lance was pretty sure they would have seen something by now if that thing was still out there.

But watching for nonexistent monsters was better than thinking about Keith. He was fully aware that _not thinking about Keith_ was a pretty damn big part of the problem, but it was such a big, complicated issue that he didn’t even know where to start. Because it wasn’t just _Keith._ It was Matt and Shiro and Allura and all the people the Galra had hurt and everyone Lance had left behind on Earth and the terrifyingly massive number of Galra Lance and his friends had _killed_ because, after all, weren’t all Galra just faceless evil monsters?

 _Nope. Not going there._ Lance switched his bayard to his left hand and wiped his right on his armor (for all the good it did.) He scanned the room, switching his bayard back to his right hand, then back again to his left. A restless energy simmered inside him, amplified by the darkness and the missing creature. Maybe it was still out there after all…

“Are you nerds done yet?” he called over his shoulder.

Keith let out a strangled groan that brought a smile to Lance’s lips. “Zarkon’s archive program is complicated, okay?”

“Uh-huh.” Lance leaned his shoulder against the door frame. “Sure.”

“It is,” Pidge said. “Stupidly complicated. I’d say it’s designed to keep out hackers, but, well, I think hacking is the only way to use it without bashing your head against the wall.”

Keith snorted, and Lance whipped around. He wasn’t--

He was. Lance caught Keith mid-laugh, a smile tugging at his lips. He had a hand on the computer console, which Pidge had powered with a crystal they’d “requisitioned” from the resistance ship _Hope of Kera_ , and he leaned over Pidge’s shoulder to look at their laptop screen, guiding them through the directories (or...something. Lance had tuned out the computer-speak for a while there.) He didn’t notice Lance looking, and for that instant he didn’t look like an enemy. Didn’t look hostile or pissed off or suspicious. He looked like just a regular person who’d been chewed up by Zarkon’s war and was trying to find his feet now that he’d come out the other side.

Guilt churned in Lance’s gut. Keith, the other Galra, this whole damn war... _Shit._

“What are you staring at?”

Lance blinked and found Keith staring back at him, his smile gone. A sour, defensive look had taken its place, and Lance couldn’t help feeling grateful for it.

“Just trying to figure out what your game is.”

Pidge’s fingers stilled on their keyboard. “Lance...”

“What?” Lance released his bayard, freeing his hands to gesture around the room. “Have you seen where we are? Sorry for being cautious, Pidge. I’m just trying to keep you alive.”

“Cautious?” Keith muttered. His lip pulled back, revealing a pair of fang-like canines. “Here’s a thought. If you want to keep us safe, how about you watch the hallway?”

Lance crossed his arms, taking a single step closer to Keith. “How do we know you didn’t already kill that other thing, huh? How do we know you aren’t just trying to distract me from your _real_ plan?”

Keith’s eye twitched. “What, exactly, do you think I’m planning?”

“I don’t know. You probably lured us out here to murder us where the others wouldn’t find out about it.”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

“ _You don’t make sense!_ ”

Lance pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, forcing himself to breathe. He could feel Pidge’s eyes on him, curious and judgmental, and he struggled not to laugh. What a mess he was. Picking fights with Keith, letting his ugly blender full of emotions get the best of him. He couldn’t even come up with good comebacks today.

He was shaking, and he knew he was shaking, and he knew the other two could probably see that he was shaking. _This is war._ He cringed away from the words, which echoed in his head like an accusation. _This is war. People die. Good people. This is war, fighter pilot, so stop being such a baby._

“Lance...”

“Shut up, Keith,” Lance snapped, but there was no heat to his words now. “I’m really not in the mood right now.”

“ _Lance_.” Keith’s voice had taken on a shrill edge that raised hairs along the back of Lance’s neck. He opened his eyes to see Pidge on their feet, summoning their bayard, a look of rising panic on their face.

Lance spun, but the creature was already charging, a flash of metal and rotting flesh dancing between the beams of the three paladins’ headlamps. Lance scrambled back into the room, summoning his bayard, though he knew it was already too late. The monster was inches away, a Galra freight train intent on crushing Lance between its metal palms.

A hand struck him between the shoulder blades. Lance pitched forward, his helmet cracking against the wall, and Pidge shouted an alarm.

Head pounding, Lance stood and spun toward the creature’s angry hiss. It had Keith backed against the far wall, where he held off one clawed metal hand with his sword while the thing's other arm, a misshapen lump of melted steel, hammered his shield.

As it raised its melted arm for another blow, Pidge fired their bayard. The blade lashed around the creature’s arm and ignited the air with crackling electricity that left the creature howling. Keith tried to slip away, but the creature buried the remnants of its hand in the wall, hemming him in. The other arm grabbed the still-sparking energy cord and yanked Pidge off their feet.

Lance activated his bayard and opened fire on the creature’s back. It twisted, eyes flashing in the light of his headlamp, and howled. It slammed its good hand into Keith’s chest, and the sound of cracking armor hit Lance like a punch to the gut.

He didn’t have time to worry about Keith, though, because the creature picked him up like a stuffed animal and threw him at Lance, knocking them both to the ground in a tangle of limbs. A pained wheeze escaped Keith, but he rolled off Lance and struggled to his feet, his sword in one hand, his dagger in the other.

“Hey, lumpy! Over here!” Pidge shouted, leaning heavily against the wall as they raised their bayard. They fired, catching the creature around the neck and unleashing an electric storm that singed Lance’s nostrils with the stink of smoking flesh.

Keith charged.

The creature saw him coming, and even with the electricity coursing through its body, it hardly seemed inconvenienced, turning toward Keith with both arms raised and ready to Hulk-smash the puny Galra into purple pulp.

 _Not today, Romero._ Lance raised his rifle and fired two shots into the creature’s face. It wasn’t any more effective today than it had been last week, but it made the monster flinch, forgetting the sword aimed at its chest for just a second.

A second was all the time Keith needed. He threw his whole weight behind his attack and buried the point of his sword in the creature’s heart. The thing could withstand a lot of damage. Slashing swords, electricity, laser blasts. But the full momentum of a charging Galra, concentrated on the tip of an energy sword—that was more than any engineered skin could handle. The sword met resistance as it entered, but it penetrated deep enough to make the creature scream and collapse, shuddering, against the wall.

Deactivating his sword, Keith stumbled back until his legs hit the edge of the computer station. He reached out to steady himself, and his hand on the console lit up the screens with an eerie red glow.

Keith pressed his other hand to the side of his face and slid to the ground, letting out a shaky laugh. “How’s that for excitement?”

Pidge was doubled over, shoulder pressed against the wall, and they giggled, a slightly manic sound that threatened to pull a laugh from Lance. “I’m so ready to be done with this planet,” Pidge muttered.

“Seriously.” Lance poked the creature with the barrel of his gun, heart still pounding. The whole fight had taken less than a minute, but he felt like he’d been running for an hour. “Hurry up and finish with the hacking, Gunderson. I want to get out of this hell-hole.”

* * *

By the time Matt woke up, Shiro was back in the little alcove, sitting on the stone bench with his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. Matt blinked at him a few times, and when Shiro looked up, Matt smiled.

“Hey, stranger,” he murmured.

Shiro stood, joining Matt on the moss-and-stone bed as Matt forced himself upright and put his shirt back on. “How are you feeling?”

“A little pissed that Mir decided to drug me.” The words strayed a little too close to the realm of haunting memories, and Matt forced himself to perk up. “I can’t complain about the sleep, though. How long was I out?”

“Two or three hours,” Shiro said. He seemed to be searching Matt for any sign of pain, so Matt sat up straighter, bumping his shoulder against Shiro’s. “You’re feeling better, though? Does it still hurt?”

Matt considered straight-up lying, but Shiro knew him too well for that. Or, well, he _had_ , before all this, and Matt wasn’t eager to find out that they’d lost their ability to tell what the other was thinking. “A little. Not nearly as much as before.”

It was true—more or less. The pain _was_ better, but it had been the pain that woke him, throbbing and hot in his core. Not the sharp pains of the last twenty-four hours or the tension that had been growing for the last week, just an all-over ache that kept him from getting truly comfortable.

They were silent for a moment, and Matt closed his eyes against the weight of mounting suspicion. Mir and Shay hadn’t removed all the crystals from his body, not even close. At the rate they worked it could be weeks before he was back to full health. Weeks that the other paladins couldn’t afford to waste sitting still. And that was assuming a full recovery was possible at all.

Matt drew in a long, shaky breath. “So what did Mir say? How long am I stuck here?”

“I don’t know. She told me to bring you to the main tunnel when you woke up.” Shiro lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “If you’re feeling up to it?”

In answer, Matt pushed himself to his feet. Walking was easier than it had been before. Now instead of feeling like his legs were filled with rusty nails, it only felt like he’d spent the previous day hiking a mountain, maybe pulled a muscle or six while he was at it. His left leg still ached, but it wobbled only a little as he started for the gap in the curtain.

He turned to smile at Shiro, who returned the expression half-heartedly and walked beside him the short distance to the main tunnel, where tools and scrap metal from Galra structures lay in piles along the wall, waiting for reconstruction crews to put them to use. Coran had his hands on a vein of crystals, which glowed cheerily. Matt could only assume Coran was sharing some of his Quintessence with the Balmera, as Allura had done before. Allura lurked behind him, her face as close to a pout as Matt had ever seen. Matt suspected she'd been banned from a repeat of her last performance.

It was Hunk and Shay, seated near a cook fire skinning cave roots, who spotted Matt first.

Hunk grinned as he stood and crossed the tunnel to pull Matt into a hug. “Matt! You’re awake!”

Matt wheezed a little as Hunk squeezed the air from his lungs, but returned the hug, patting Hunk’s back and offering a smile to Allura and Coran, who abandoned their work with the crystals to join the others.

“How are you feeling?” Allura asked, her calm demeanor undermined somewhat by the open concern in her eyes.

“Much better,” he assured her. He nodded to Shay and to Mir as she approached with Rax, who still had two young Balmeran’s hanging off him, one wrapped around his neck, the other dangling from his arm. As they drew near, Matt pulled away from Hunk and turned to face Mir. “How long…? When can I…?”

Mir’s eyes softened. She glanced toward a quiet corner of the tunnel, away from prying ears, and Matt recognized the offer of privacy. Considering what he’d heard the last time a healer had offered him privacy, Matt was expecting something close to a death sentence, but he shook his head. If it was bad news, he wasn't sure he'd be able to put on a brave face long enough to tell the others.

Mir sighed. “Your life is not in danger,” she said, catching his eye. “You should know that before we speak of anything else.”

“Great,” Matt muttered, tension creeping back into his shoulders. “That’s a _very_ reassuring way to start off a conversation.”

“It is the truth,” Mir said. “You have a long road ahead of you, young one, and I would not want to discourage you before you begin.”

“How long?”

Lowering her eyes, Mir took Matt’s hand in both her own. “What the Galra did to you… It is no small thing. You have many crystal seeds within you—more than when the Galra lost you, I think.”

“Wait.” Shiro leaned forward, his face pale. “It’s _spreading_?”

“Slowly,” said Shay. “Perhaps only because of the attack you spoke of. Quintessence makes the crystals grow. It may also cause them to multiply.”

“Even so.” Mir dropped Matt’s hand and looked up at him, her luminous eyes bright with sympathy. “It makes for slow healing. We have guided the crystals to where they will not harm you, so you can leave now and continue your fight.”

Matt swallowed, his throat so thick he could barely force himself to speak. “I’m sensing a ‘but’ in there.”

Mir’s eyes closed. “You will need healing in the future. To remove crystals and to redirect new ones as they grow to where they will do the least damage.”

“How often?”

“It is difficult to say. If you avoid Quintessence, you may be able to go some time without needing aid. If you encounter trouble—well, you see how far it has progressed since last you visited us here.”

Matt sucked in a short, sharp breath and held it, disappointment pressing at the back of his eyes. “I see,” he whispered. Shiro reached out to comfort him, but Matt pulled away, turning to face Shiro and the others. “You’ll have to leave me behind.”

“ _What?_ ” Shiro took a small step forward, then hesitated, his face unreadable. “No. I’m not leaving you, Matt.”

“You have to. Zarkon’s not just going to wait because I’m sick. You can’t afford to make the trip back here every week or two so Mir can heal me—and it’s not like you actually _need_ me. Keith can pilot Red. You’ve already formed Voltron with him once.”

“Then I’ll stay with you,” Shiro argued. “Allura piloted the Black Lion before. Why can’t--”

“Don’t.” Matt’s fists clenched at his side, and he turned his gaze aside. “The others still need all the help they can get. You can’t just abandon them for me.”

Shiro opened his mouth to argue, then stopped. Matt smiled to himself. If there was one thing he could count on, it was that Shiro would always do what was best for everyone, even if it wasn’t what he wanted. Voltron needed someone like Shiro. Matt could get by without him. He’d done it before.

“Forgive me,” Shay said in a small voice. She seemed to shrink as five pairs of eyes turned to her, and she glanced at Mir, who nodded encouragingly. “There is yet a way for you to remain with your team.”

Shiro brightened almost imperceptibly. “How?”

Shay glanced over her shoulder at Rax. “I… could accompany you. Then you would have no need to return here for healing.”

“ _What?_ ” Rax’s voice was low and sharp, and Shay flinched. “You cannot— _vex_.” He rounded on Mir. “You knew of this?”

Mir nodded placidly. “It is the best choice. The universe needs Voltron more than you need your sister, young one.”

Bristling, Rax disentangled himself from the children he was carrying. “She is younger than me! How can you send her off with these skylings to their war?”

“Our war.”

Rax stilled at Shay’s words and turned toward her, frowning. “What?”

Lacing her fingers together, Shay looked up at him. “Our war. The Galra do not distinguish between those who fight and those who do not. They took over our home. They have taken over many other Balmera, and many other worlds besides. Anything I can do to aid the paladins of Voltron I will gladly do.”

“It’ll be dangerous,” Matt said, trying to contain the bubble of relief and gratitude growing inside him. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”

Shay nodded. “Since you left, I have dreamed of leaving this place, taking a stand against Zarkon. I wish to help the other Balmera out there who still live under his thumb—and not only Balmera. All people deserve freedom. If I can help in any way…” She squared her shoulders. “Please allow me to accompany you.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then Allura stepped forward and took Shay’s hands. “Well, then. Welcome aboard.”

* * *

Keith and the others didn’t make it back to the rendezvous point before the castle-ship. There had been a few hiccups in the data-transfer process, and Pidge had insisted on creating a back-up, just in case. Keith would have thought they’d be impatient to get back to their brother, but if anything they seemed to be dragging their feet.

They seemed almost relieved when they emerged from the wormhole to an angry lecture from Matt that chased them all the way to their hangars.

“You can’t just _run off_ like that without telling me! What if something happened to you? What if you got attacked?”

“It wasn’t like we _planned_ it,” Lance muttered as Keith disembarked and headed for the elevator. “We hit the base like we planned and didn’t find anything useful, so we improvised.”

Keith crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall of the elevator. He’d contemplated taking off his helmet so he didn’t have to hear the argument, but he _was_ trying to be part of this team, wasn’t he? Ignoring the other paladins—tempting as it was—probably wasn’t the best way to get to know them.

Matt let out a sigh just as the elevator doors slid open. “You should have at least found the rest of us before you went back there.”

Pidge skulked out of their elevator, pulled off their helmet, and tossed it onto the chair at their station. “So, what? I was supposed to just sit there and twiddle my thumbs while I waited to see if you passed out from the pain again?”

Matt ran his fingers through his hair, sighing. A Balmeran stood behind him with Hunk, and Lance dug an elbow into Hunk’s side as he passed, making the taller boy blush.

Allura fixed them each with a frown in turn. “Matt is right. Disappearing without leaving word of your destination was reckless and irresponsible.”

“It worked, didn’t it?” Keith sat sideways on the red paladin’s chair—his chair, he supposed, though it felt strange to call it that—letting his feet dangle over the arm. He felt the pressing weight of eyes on him and turned toward Shiro and Allura, who regarded him with matching scowls. Keith ducked his head into a shrug. “What? No one got hurt, and we got the information we were after. What more do you want?”

Shiro pressed a hand to his forehead and Allura crossed her arms, launching into a lecture Keith didn’t hear. His attention drifted toward Lance, who watched him from across the bridge where he still stood with Hunk and the Balmeran. Keith couldn’t put a name to Lance’s expression—furrowed brow, lip caught between his teeth.

As soon as he caught Keith watching him, Lance’s face shut down, regaining that familiar, hostile edge. Keith scowled right back at him.

It was Lance who broke eye contact first, his hands rubbing at the armor over his hips like he was searching for pockets. He hesitated, then crossed to where Keith sat.

“So…” Lance pursed his lips. “Back there, you...”

Lance let the sentence hang, and Keith stared at him, narrowing his eyes. “Back there I...what?”

Running a hand through his hair, Lance stared hard at the wall. “You know.”

“No,” said Keith. “I don’t.” He waited, but Lance didn’t go on, and Keith felt his fur begin to stand on end. “If you’re planning on accusing me of yet another _evil Galra scheme_ , just get it over with.”

Lance’s head snapped back toward Keith, and his eyebrow twitched. “I was _trying_ to thank you for saving my life, asshole.”

There was a hard edge to his voice that set Keith’s teeth on edge. “Don’t worry," he said tightly. "It won’t happen again.”

Lance stiffened, and Keith got the sense he’d been expecting some other response. He opened his mouth like he was ready to argue, then thought better of it. With a huff, he turned on his heel and stalked from the room, silencing whatever it was Allura had been saying.

Pidge watched Lance go, then turned to Keith. “What was that all about?”

Keith groaned, slumping backwards in the chair. “I have _no_ idea.”

“You… don’t get humans, do you?”

“I don’t get _people_ ,” Keith said. It had never bothered him that he didn’t know how to connect with the other Galra, but this did. He wasn’t sure what made it different, but he _wanted_ the paladins to like him. He just… didn’t know what _they_ wanted from him.

Pidge hiked their laptop higher on their back, then held out a fist toward Keith. He recognized the gesture as something Shiro did on occasion, and he instinctively raised his own fist to meet Pidge’s. In the instant of expectant silence that followed, Keith wondered whether he’d misinterpreted Pidge’s intent, panicked, and snatched his hand back.

Then Pidge broke into a grin. “I’m gonna grab some food goo, then get started on these files. I could use some help with the translation, if you don’t have anything better to do.”

Keith recognized it as a peace offering allowed himself a small smile. He may have been stumbling blind through his attempts at friendship, but apparently he'd managed to do something right. “Sure,” he said. “Sounds fun.”


	2. Practical Team Building

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: Matt headed to the Balmera with half the team for a bit of healing. He's not out of the woods yet, so in order to avoid keeping him cooped up and out of the action, Shay volunteered to come along. Meanwhile Keith, Lance, and Pidge headed back to Vel-17, where they managed to extract research records that they hope will tell them what's wrong with Matt and how to fix it.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #713  
>  Dated two and a half years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Today imperial scouts discovered life on a dead planet, designation Ziva-X-alpha. Earlier reports indicated no signs of life and estimated a period of greater than one year since complete Quintessential loss.
> 
> Three survivors have been recovered from the surface. A preliminary examination indicates the survivors are, for the most part, physically healthy, but their behavior is feral. They will be transferred to this lab for further study.

* * *

“Karen, you need to eat something.”

Shooting Eli Kahale a frown, Karen Holt plugged her ear and pressed her cell phone tighter against her head. “Come on,” she muttered, pacing the length of her kitchen. “Come _on_ , Val, pick up.”

“Karen...”

For the fifteenth time that day, the call went to voice mail, Val’s cheery voice reciting the same, _This is Val. Leave a message!_

Karen swore and hung up, then turned on her heel in the doorway and headed back the other direction as she dialed Akira Shirogane. This, too, went to voice mail—though that was even less surprising than Val not answering. Akira taught flight classes at the Garrison, so he rarely answered his phone during the day. Especially if it was Karen. She waited anyway, and started talking as soon as the voice mail beeped.

“It’s Karen. I still haven’t heard anything from Val. Did something happen last night?”

“ _Karen._ ”

Eli placed his hands on her shoulders, halting her in her tracks. Karen fell silent, staring at Eli for several long seconds. He was only a few inches taller than her, thickset, with the same dark skin, dark hair, and warm brown eyes as his nephew Hunk, though Eli’s eyes were framed by worry lines Karen knew were at least forty percent her fault. He glanced at the mustard-covered butter knife in his hand, then set it on the counter.

Sighing, Karen let him steer her toward the kitchen table. “Let me know if you hear anything,” she said into the phone, then ended the call and rubbed her temples. “Something happened, Eli,” she said, bracing for an argument.

Eli said nothing, just set a turkey sandwich on the table in front of her. “Eat.”

“It’s been almost a day since she went there.” Karen stared down at the sandwich for a moment, then pushed it away, ignoring Eli’s frown. She couldn’t eat now, not when Val had gone missing, as the crew of the _Persephone_ had gone missing last year, as Pidge and their team had gone missing last month.

The Garrison had a hand in Pidge, Hunk, and Lance's disappearance—Karen was certain of that much. Whether the children had been killed, arrested, or sent away somewhere, she didn’t know, but she didn’t doubt Val would meet the same fate if she’d been caught snooping again.

“She should have called by now,” Karen went on. “She should have come over for lunch. And she’s _never_ gone more than an hour without saying something in the group chat. I swear she sets an alarm for three a.m. just to send us all a picture of some cartoon character.”

“Video game characters.”

Karen blinked. “What?”

“The memes she sends. They’re usually… you know what? Doesn’t matter.” Eli’s lips twitched toward a smile, but it petered out almost instantly. “I know you’re worried, Karen, but we can’t do anything until we hear back from Akira. For all we know, Val didn’t even go to the Garrison yesterday. She could just be busy with family business, or maybe she found someone new to interview about the accident. In the mean time, _eat._ Take a shower. Distract yourself, Karen. You’re going to make yourself sick at this rate.”

He was right, and Karen knew it. She’d skipped dinner the night before and hadn’t slept well, her thoughts tied up with Val’s plan to sneak into the Garrison for information. Karen _knew_ Val shouldn’t have gone alone—but she’d insisted on stealth, and that meant going in solo. Karen should have argued harder.

She hadn’t, and now she was tired and restless, and she had a pounding headache. She had a case she was supposed to be reviewing for work and a stack of public records to dissect in search of more leverage against Iverson. In lieu of some damning piece of evidence, they needed to drown the Garrison in litigation. It was too powerful to be brought down by one or two civil suits, and so far the only thing Karen could make a case for was the wrongful death of the three cadets.

But all she could think about was Val.

It was absurd, of course. Val was a grown woman, and she’d been getting into trouble on her own before Karen came along with this impossible quest, but Karen couldn’t help feeling responsible. Maybe it was because Val was the same age as Matt. Maybe it was that Karen had grown attached to Val and the rest of her little militia over the course of the last month.

She’d lost enough family to the Garrison already.

She stood, ignoring Eli’s concern, and headed for the stairs. “I’m going to call her parents.” She didn’t give Eli time to protest; she was up the stairs and shut up in her bedroom before he found his voice.

Karen was a paranoid woman. She hoarded information and the physical paper on which it was printed—not because she didn’t trust computers, but because she didn’t want a power outage to cut her legs out from under her. Her office was filled with filing cabinets full of court documents, newspaper clippings, reports from government agencies—anything she could get her hands on that might help her clients’ cases. Even when she found information digitally, she printed off a copy to add to her files. Hell, she was the only person she knew who still used a rolodex to organize her contacts. It helped her think.

On the job, paranoia was a good thing. She was always prepared, always knew exactly where to find an answer if she didn’t know it straight away.

So of course she had let that side of herself carry over into this investigation. She needed every weapon at her disposal if she wanted to bring down the Galaxy Garrison. That meant knowing everything about her partners that she possibly could—and knowing it before the unthinkable happened. Allergies, emergency contacts, full name and date of birth… Anything they were willing to tell her that might help in an emergency. Akira understood, even if Val and Eli found it slightly unnerving.

Karen was glad for it now. She flipped through the notebook she kept in her bedside table until she reached the page containing contact information for Val’s family.

She dialed Carmen Mendoza’s number before she could think better of this plan.

Carmen picked up after two rings. “Hello?”

“Mrs. Mendoza? Hi. My name’s Karen Holt. I’m trying to get in touch with your daughter, Val? She’s not answering her cell, and this is the only other number I have for her.” A lie, but hopefully one that would allay any suspicions Carmen Mendoza might have about a stranger calling to ask about her grown daughter. The last thing Karen wanted was for this to turn into a discussion of Lance Mendoza’s disappearance. She’d learned from the Kahales what happened when she wasn’t careful about how she broached that subject.

Carmen was quiet for a moment, then hummed in thought. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “She isn’t here now.”

“Do you have any idea where she might be?” Karen asked, trying not to sound too frantic.

“I would assume she’s at work. Maybe if you try her cell later tonight?”

Karen pressed her lips together. Apparently Val hadn’t spoken much to her family recently, and not only where the investigation was concerned. Or maybe she just hadn't wanted to try to explain to her parents that she'd lost her job at a local newspaper after pissing off Iverson.

If Carmen didn’t know about Val being fired two weeks ago, Karen doubted she would know anything about what had happened to Val last night. Thanking the woman as graciously as she could, Karen hung up, then stared at her phone screen, as though simple willpower could make Val return her phone calls.

_Please, Val. You have to be okay._

* * *

“Lance!” Hunk shouted. “Behind you!”

Allura cringed as Lance hit the training room wall, courtesy of a blow from the gladiator. The training drone Lance had been aiming at took advantage of Hunk’s distraction and zapped him in the shoulder. He yelped and stumbled backwards—straight into Shiro, who hastily deactivated his prosthetic arm before it could burn the younger paladin.

Keith spotted the gladiator advancing on Shiro and Hunk and broke away from the drone he was supposed to be flanking with Pidge to intercept the gladiator. It landed a solid hit to Keith’s ribs—though, honestly, what else did he expect? Allura would admit the young Galra was an accomplished swordsman, and he’d adapted quickly enough to the form the bayard took for him, a double-edged blade, but he’d had to sprint across the training room to reach the gladiator, which meant he’d had no time to prepare a block.

Across the room, Pidge suddenly found themself alone against a level four drone and ducked behind their shield as it peppered them with laserfire.

Matt, who sat on a stool beside Allura and Coran in the control booth, cringed. “Okay, on second thought? I’m actually kinda glad you didn’t let me train today. That looks painful.”

Allura didn’t want to agree aloud, but she let out a heavy sigh as the gladiator lifted Keith off the ground and flung him at Lance, who had just managed to pick himself up off the floor. She was starting to regret upping the difficulty on the simulator, but Shiro and Keith had extensive practice on the battlefield, and Allura hadn’t wanted them winning the battle on their own. The point of the exercise was teamwork, after all, and that meant not simply letting the best warriors clean up by themselves.

She’d assumed—incorrectly, it would seem—that forming Voltron would have at least begun to turn these five paladins into a team.

“Hunk,” Shiro barked, charging toward the gladiator. “Take care of that drone.”

Hunk stammered an agreement and opened fire on the second drone, which zipped away from his barrage, leading him around the battlefield by the nose. Shiro managed to hold his own against the Gladiator for a while, but the drone that had Pidge backed into a corner soon tired of its game and turned its fire on Shiro.

The low-power laser caught him in the spine and he lost focus, his body stiffening for half a second before the gladiator brought him down with a low, sweeping strike.

Groaning, Allura waved a hand at Coran. “Turn it off,” she said. “They’re done.”

The gladiator straightened, its one glowing eye going dim. The drones disappeared into their storage cells in the ceiling, and the lights in the control booth brightened.

“That...” Allura paused as the five paladins below turned toward her. She didn’t want to be unnecessarily harsh, but she could think of no gentle way to put it. “That was awful.”

“Don’t look at me!” Lance cried, though as a point of fact, no one had given any sign that they blamed the failure on him. “Keith was the one who went all gung-ho on us when he was _supposed_ to be watching my back.”

Keith rounded on Lance, a snarl visible beneath his helmet. “Oh, right. What about _you_?”

“What _about_ me?”

“You were _trying_ to get the drone to shoot me!”

“I was not.” Lance crossed his arms. “You would’ve deserved it if I _had_ , though. I mean, it’s not bad enough you ditched _me_ , then you go and abandon _Pidge_ to a drone, too?”

Keith shot a look at Pidge, his shoulders tucking toward his ears. “They had it covered,” he said, somewhat subdued.

“They were cowering in the corner!”

“Lance,” Hunk said, hands up in a placating gesture.

Pidge, however, spoke right over him. “Hey, at least I didn’t get bitch slapped against the wall.”

“Oh, real nice, Gunderson. How about you try to focus on the real enemy instead of taking petty snips at me, huh?”

Hunk visibly flinched, shooting a look at Keith. “Lance, come on. Don’t do this.”

Shiro placed a hand on Lance’s chest before he could launch into a full-blown tirade. “Keith isn’t your enemy, Lance. He’s your teammate.”

“Easy for _you_ to say,” Lance muttered. “Keith could punt a kitten into a bonfire and you’d say _oh, hey, well at least he made an effort!_ ”

“Lance!” Allura snapped, slamming her hand down on the console. Shiro had snatched his hand back from Lance’s chest, and Keith stared at the door like he was considering making a break for it. Allura took a breath, forcing herself to maintain control. Escalating this argument wouldn’t help anything. “Lance, that was out of line.”

He rounded on her, tugging off his helmet. “But--”

“We’re done here for the day. I suggest you all take some time to calm down before dinner.”

Lance’s eyes narrowed. Then he huffed, threw his helmet at the wall, and stormed out of the training room, the other paladins watching him go in silence. Hunk reached out as Lance passed, but Lance shrugged him off, muttering something Allura couldn’t hear that made Hunk back off.

Allura switched off the microphone and darkened the windows before she slumped forward onto the console, sighing heavily. Matt quietly reached forward to pat her shoulder.

“They’re hopeless, I know,” he said wryly. “And the worst thing is I don’t know if me being down there would have made things better or worse.”

Allura straightened, gathering her composure. “They aren’t hopeless. Just… unused to each other.” What they really needed was team building exercises. The only question was which exercise would help and not just make things worse. She’d started with the gladiator because all five paladins were used to battle by now, but that had gone poorly. She doubted they would be able to form Voltron, let alone hold it, without something like the battle on Berlou to motivate them, and she wasn’t about to handcuff them together. Not after seeing the way it had affected Matt last time.

She supposed there was always the mind-meld device—but as much as she hated to admit it, she wasn’t sure she would trust Lance and Keith with access to one another’s minds. Not as things stood now.

“Perhaps another slumber party?” Coran suggested.

Matt grimaced. “I don’t think that would go over well with Lance and Keith being... the way they are.”

“We’d certainly have to ban truth or dare,” Allura agreed. “I don’t want either of them ending up hurt over something as petty as that.” She shook her head. “Why don’t you two take a break as well? I’ll think it over and see if I can come up with something that _won’t_ end with one of my paladins in a cryopod.”

* * *

Hunk waited for the others to leave before he tried to approach Keith. Which mostly meant waiting for Shiro to leave; Lance and Pidge barely stayed in the prep room long enough to change out of their armor before stalking off in opposite directions. Shiro lingered, though, cornering Keith by his locker and speaking in a low tone that Hunk studiously ignored.

He buffed a scuff mark on his armor longer than was strictly necessary—but cleaning his armor gave him something to do other than twiddle his thumbs and try not to look like a creeper.

In all honesty, he wished he could go find Lance and talk to _him_. Hunk knew something was bothering Lance, and he wanted to help Lance through it--that was what best friends were for, wasn't it? But there were some lines you just didn't cross, and Lance asking to be left alone, as he had on the way out of the training room, was one of them. In the two years Hunk had known Lance, he'd only asked for space twice: once in their first week at the Garrison, when the homesickness hit him hard, and once near the end of their first year after Iverson chewed Lance out about how he needed to "stop slacking and put in some goddamn effort" if he ever wanted to make fighter pilot.

The fact that Lance was _that_ beat up over the situation with Keith suggested that Lance's problem was way more serious than the others realized.

But he'd asked to be left alone, and Hunk would respect that. For now. He'd be there when Lance needed him, and until then he would do what he could to make sure Keith was holding up all right.

“You don’t have to coddle me, Shiro,” Keith snapped, startling Hunk into dropping his armor. The noise of it drowned out Shiro’s reply, but from Keith’s growl it was pretty much the opposite of diffusing the situation.

Hunk risked a glance over his shoulder. Shiro had his hands up, but Keith was bristling like a wet cat, and the glare he had fixed on Shiro reminded Hunk of an arc welder.

“Lance can do whatever he wants,” Keith hissed. “It’s not my problem.”

Except it kind of was, Hunk thought, considering what Lance wanted was Keith gone. From the look of things, Shiro agreed with Hunk, but he just shook his head and backed off, sighing. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll be with Matt if you want to talk.”

Keith grunted, and Shiro headed for the door.

“Oh. Hi, Shay.”

“Hello, Shiro.”

Hunk swiveled toward the door, then glanced back at Keith, who was staring blankly at the bracer in his hands. Maybe now wasn’t a great time to talk to Keith, grumpy as he was. Or it might be the best time to remind him he did, in fact, have friends here besides Shiro. Hunk didn't yet know Keith well enough to guess which it was.

Shay saved him the trouble of deciding whether to stay or leave by poking her head into the prep room, which was situated just below the training deck. The lockers here—big metal tubes that held the paladins’ armor—were connected to the prep room below the bridge and to each of the lions’ hangars so the paladins could access their armor wherever they needed it. Hunk put his helmet in with the rest of the armor, then sat to put on his sneakers.

“Hey,” he said, glancing up at Shay. “Come to watch the training?”

“I...I did attempt to watch, yes.”

Frowning, Hunk sat upright and raised an eyebrow at Shay.

Her gaze wandered toward the wall. “I had not expected anything so… intense. I stepped out before the end.”

“Probably for the best,” Hunk said. “We kind of fell apart there. Not the greatest first impression.” He paused, worrying his lip. “Hey, are you okay? You seem upset.”

“It’s nothing,” Shay said brightly. “I suppose I am just ill-suited to battle.” She rubbed her arms, offering Hunk a thin smile. “I do not enjoy watching my friends get hurt.”

Keith slammed his breastplate down in his locker with a _bang_ that startled both Hunk and Shay. Turning, Hunk saw that Keith was scowling again, though not at them specifically. More like he was pissed at the entire universe.

“This is war,” he said in a low voice. “You’re not _supposed_ to enjoy it.”

Shay cringed. “Of course. Forgive me. I… I was not thinking.”

“No, hold on.” Hunk grabbed her wrist before she could make a break for it. “I get where you’re coming from, Keith. I do. You and me—we signed up for a fight, and we’re gonna see it through. But… come on, man. Shay’s been here for, like, two days. You know what I was doing on my second day out here? I was hyperventilating in a closet because I was so scared one of us was gonna die. Hell, I had a freaking panic attack the first time we went up against the gladiator. Shay’s doing pretty good if you ask me.”

Keith’s ears twitched, but he said nothing as he stepped into the boots he’d kept from his Galra armor. He’d traded out the rest of his wardrobe for Altean hand-me-downs, but apparently none of the shoes in the castle fit right.

“Sorry,” Keith said tightly, bending to tighten the laces of his boots. When he began to straighten, he tensed, hissing in pain, and reached for the spot on his ribs where the gladiator had hit him.

Shay was at his side in an instant, her hand on his side and glowing as it had when she guided the crystals out of Matt’s body.

Keith jerked away from her, his ears lying flat against his skull. But his wary expression loosened after an instant, and he blinked as he gingerly touched his ribs. “What…?”

Shay smiled. “As I said. I do not like to see my friends in pain. Better, I think, to wait until you have finished collecting bruises and will allow me to aid you.”

For a moment, Keith just stared at her, clearly stunned. Then he chuckled, shoulders losing their rigid set. “Thanks,” he said as she reached out again to finish what she's started. 

“Of course.”

Hunk flashed her a smile, then glanced at Keith. “You hungry?” he asked. “I was thinking of heading up to the kitchen to get a head start on dinner. If you want, we could start figuring out what kind of food-goo-based-delicacies I can use to bribe you. Y'know. For future reference,” he added, winking.

Keith tilted his head to the side, as though confused by Hunk’s offer. “Thanks, but… no. I need to talk to Allura.”

His words rang with finality, and Hunk figured it was better not to press. Not after training today, not when Keith and Hunk's friendship was still in its infancy. Baby steps.

“All right.” Hunk shrugged, knotted his laces, and stood. “But come find me if you finish before dinner and want some company, okay?”

* * *

“Enemy fighters closing in on the northern flank.” Thace kept his voice level, his words terse but neutral. It was a fine line he had to walk—neither so concerned Prorok would think him unfit for command nor so bored that those around him would begin to suspect the truth.

Prorok gripped the arms of his command seat and growled at the display screen showing the battle raging over the planet Laerta. “Send the second flight to take care of them,” he barked, and one of the officers near Thace voiced an acknowledgment before beginning to relay the orders. Prorok pinched the bridge of his nose. “This was supposed to be a quiet sector.”

Thace kept his head down, watching the progress of Flight Four on his screens. They’d been the first hit by Laertan counterstrikes, but Thace had so far managed to keep most of his men alive. As much as he’d love to see the Galra army decimated here today, he had a reputation among Prorok’s troops as a quick thinker and a superior strategist. The fighters under his direct command had to outperform their comrades if Thace wanted to prevent suspicious eyes from turning his way.

It wasn’t difficult, of course. Not when Thace had a good idea what the enemy was planning.

This time had gone more smoothly than most, and Thace had managed to win the trust of several governmental bodies down on Laerta before Prorok began his attack. Supplying them with Prorok’s own battle plans had certainly aided Thace’s efforts—but most of his luck had come from the fact that Laerta was in contact with the organization that had ordered Thace to look into CORE (a difficult mission even without the near constant battles). As soon as the Laertans had verified Thace’s identification code with their contact, much of their suspicion had faded.

He hoped they weren’t too bitter that Prorok fought back. The Laertans weren’t likely to ever realize what hand Thace had had in Prorok’s small success here, but he always felt a sliver of guilt at fighting back.

After twenty years, it was easy enough to quiet his doubts. This was war. People died, and Thace had to accept a certain amount of blood on his hands in order to assure his continued position in Prorok’s good graces.

Still, he was grateful when Prorok finally pulled out. It wasn’t a total victory for either side—more Galra than Laertans had died, but the Laertan army was smaller and didn’t have hundreds of other warships that could be called in for backup. Prorok wasn’t giving up, either. Not until Laerta was defeated or assimilated.

That was they key, though, wasn’t it? Zarkon didn’t advertise the treaties he made with rebellious worlds. He didn’t want to encourage the people of the universe to rise up against him. But sometimes, if a planet held out long enough and proved itself a worthy foe, then if they approached the Galra with an offer of truce, they could enter the empire on their own terms.

It was still subjugation, but for a planet like Laerta, which up until a few months ago had been part of a small, independent pocket of systems near the edge of the Galra empire, it was the best option. Laerta’s allies had been falling, one at a time, over the last few months, and the coalition was on the verge of collapse.

With any luck, Thace could ensure them a measure of freedom, allow them to live with only nominal Galra control. They could bide their time until Voltron began to push back the boundaries of the empire. When that day came, the paladins might well find an ally waiting here, ready to rejoin the battle—just as they might find other allies waiting where Thace and the rest of the rebellion had been at work.

For now, though, the people of Laerta would have a moment’s respite, and perhaps Thace could finally dig up something on CORE, which had so far remained a vague whisper at the edge of his sphere of influence. He’d heard from Dez that it might have something to do with Haggar’s Project Robeast, so he’d focused his attention there, hoping to find a reference to CORE, but with no luck. (Though, honestly, the work Haggar was doing with her robeasts was chilling enough without any side projects added to the pot.)

Before Thace could leave the bridge in search of a private computer terminal at which to spend the next several hours, Prorok called out his name. Thace stopped, hiding his unease, and turned to salute.

“Yes, sir?”

Prorok glanced around at the other officers—those streaming from the bridge now that the battle was over, as well as those who remained to run the ship through its night cycle. Lips turning down into a frown, Prorok gestured for Thace to follow him.

Thace obeyed, scrutinizing the commander as they walked. He didn’t seem angry or accusatory, which meant this likely wasn’t about Thace’s quiet rebellion, but anything that had to be said in private couldn’t be good.

They stopped at a private conference room around the corner from the bridge. Prorok gestured Thace inside, then followed with a glance down the corridor outside. Once inside, Prorok keyed in a command on his wrist unit, and the indicator light on the camera in the corner of the ceiling went dark.

Still Thace remained silent, his hands clasped behind his back as he waited for Prorok to speak.

When he did, he didn’t beat around the bush. “There’s a spy aboard this ship.”

“Sir?” Thace didn’t let his surprise show, though his heart beat a little faster. He scoured Prorok’s expression for signs of accusation, but he found none.

“You saw the way that battle went,” Prorok said. “Those Laertans were expecting us. Somebody gave them our plans.”

“I thought the same, sir,” Thace said in a carefully neutral tone. “May I ask why you are telling me this?”

Prorok waved a hand. “Well it wasn’t _you_ who sold us out,” he said, and Thace resisted the urge to smile. Playing nice with the bigwigs had its perks. “I’ve got a new job for you, Lieutenant. Whatever other tasks you’re on, they’re on hold. I need you to get with Nadezda in IntSec and find out who’s betrayed us.”

 _Shouldn’t be too hard,_ Thace thought, bowing to Prorok to hide his amusement. _Seeing as you’ve assigned both your resident traitors to the task._ Aloud, he only said, “Of course, sir. You can count on me.”

* * *

Coran found Lance on the observation deck, an enormous sphere that projected a view of the area around the castle. Currently that meant a sea of unfamiliar stars and, beneath Coran’s feet, a planet called Tris 3 that produced enough Quintessence to support plant life, but not much else.

Lance's sweaty hair was furrowed, as though he’d been running his fingers through it repeatedly since Allura called an end to training. He’d changed out of his armor, but it looked like he’d skipped the shower—and the food goo, and the relaxation, and pretty much any part of the paladins’ usual post-training routine. Pacing along the railing, Lance muttered to himself in the language Matt had once identified as Spanish. The castle’s translators had begun to pick it apart, resulting in a mashup of translated and untranslated words and phrases that was _almost_ intelligible.

“Keep that up and you’re not going to have your secret language for long, Blue.”

Lance tensed, his quiet tirade coming to an abrupt halt as he glanced over his shoulder. When he saw it was Coran—and, perhaps more importantly, _only_ Coran—he relaxed.

“It’s not a _secret_ language,” he said, leaning against the railing. The observation platform Lance and Coran stood on was only designed for three or four people at a time—not large enough by half for Lance to run away when Coran came to stand next to him. Lance shied away all the same, staring at the star Tris, which glowed yellow-white in the distance ahead of them. “Is the castle really learning Spanish?”

Coran shrugged. “The translation software automatically analyzes any new language it encounters. Takes a while to work out all the kinks, but after a couple of days--well, weeks, when it's just the one of you... Ta-dah! Universal communication!”

"A couple days?" Lance frowned. "Didn’t take too long for it to learn English."

“The castle-ship draws on a universal database. It would have already learned anything Matt, his father, or Shiro said while in Galra custody.” Coran paused, testing the silence. “I could disable the translation function for your language, if you’d prefer.”

Lance turned, a smile tugging at his lips. “You know, I might just take you up on that. No fun insulting people if they know what I’m saying.”

Coran laughed, and the last of Lance’s tension bled away. He crossed his arms atop the railing and watched the stars drift by beneath them in time to the castle-ship’s slow orbit around Tris 3.

“I thought you were here to lecture me,” Lance admitted. “So, uh… Thanks. For not doing that.”

“You don’t need a lecture, Lance,” Coran said, watching Lance from the corner of his eye. His stance spoke of weariness and guilt, not this exaggerated hostility he projected around the others, and Coran had seen enough young soldiers covering their insecurity with aggression to know Lance was more troubled than he let on. “You’re not a cruel person.”

Scoffing, Lance pulled his jacket’s hood up, hiding his face. “You sure about that? Because I’m pretty sure everyone else here thinks I’m an asshole.”

“The Blue Lion doesn’t.”

The only reaction that got was a minute twitch of Lance’s shoulders, not quite a shrug and not quite a cringe.

Undeterred, Coran continued. “She didn’t choose you for nothing, you know. Which tells me what’s bothering you isn’t just some grudge you have against Keith.”

Lance held out a moment longer before he twisted his head a fraction toward Coran. “Why?” he asked in a low voice. “Why _did_ the Blue Lion choose me?”

* * *

“Why did you trust me?”

Allura, who had been busy digging through her father’s notes in search of advice on training paladins, looked up from the computer at the sound of Keith’s voice. He stood at the rear of the bridge, his eyes fixed on the hologram projector below the main crystal.

“I’m sorry?”

Keith’s eyes narrowed, but otherwise his blank expression didn’t change. “Back on Berlou,” he said. “I figure you probably knew Shiro was the black paladin right away, but you were as surprised as I was when Red accepted me.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his borrowed Altean jumpsuit. “How did you know you could trust me?”

“Your knife--”

“I know.” Keith tensed, then shook his head. “I know what you said. But—look, I’ll grant you that Sendak wouldn’t be caught dead using a wimpy little dagger like this. But you couldn’t have known it was mine. Shiro had Galra armor on when you found us. Why not assume he’d had a Galra knife at some point, too?”

Allura was quiet for a moment, studying Keith. Without armor, standing fewer than a dozen paces away, his shoulders hunched like he was trying to hide, he looked incredibly young. His frame would have been average for a human or Altean at his developmental level, but he was exceptionally small for a Galra—at least in comparison to the other Galra soldiers she’d fought this last month. Ten thousand years ago, the Galra had looked different. Less like warriors, more like scholars and artisans. More like Keith.

He reminded her a great deal of Rukka.

When Keith began to fidget, shooting glances at Allura he probably thought she didn’t see, she decided to take pity on him.

“Just because Lance searches for reasons not to trust you doesn’t mean we all do.”

Keith looked up at her then, his eyes wide with shock. “I never said anything about Lance.”

“You didn’t have to.” Smiling, Allura waved him closer. “You may not know this, but Coran and I were in cryosleep for nearly ten thousand years.”

Keith’s steps slowed halfway to where she stood. “I had no idea.”

Allura nodded, turning her attention to her father’s logs as Keith stepped up beside her. “I grew up in a universe where Galra and Altea were close allies. Many of my friends were Galra. Two of the paladins my father trained were Galra—and of them all, Zarkon was the only one who betrayed my trust.”

She pulled up an image of the paladins shortly before Zarkon’s betrayal. Rukka, the other Galra on the team, stood in her yellow armor beside the green paladin, a Piraxan man named Sa, and the red paladin, an Altean woman named Keturah. Rukka was short and compact, the tips of her membranous ears barely reaching Zarkon’s shoulders. Zarkon himself stood at the center of the group, smiling. His age was beginning to show in the lines around his eyes, but his stance was loose, and he had an arm draped across the blue paladin’s shoulders—an irony that twisted at Allura’s gut.

Allura turned to find Keith staring openly at the image, and she gave him a bittersweet smile. “This war is still new to me. Ever since I awoke, I’ve been searching for proof that the Galra I remember still exist.”

“So, what, you drop your guard for the first Galra who doesn’t shoot on sight?” Keith scowled at the image of the former paladins. “You’re not that stupid.”

Chuckling, Allura powered down the display and turned to fully face Keith. “No,” she said, electing to ignore the second half of Keith’s statement. “I dropped my guard for _you._ ”

“But _why_?”

“Well, for one thing, I knew that dagger couldn’t have belonged to Shiro.”

Keith tipped his head to the side, frowning. “How could you possibly know that?”

“He’s human. He wouldn't have been given a dagger like that, and he wouldn’t appreciate its significance enough to steal it.” From the confused frown on Keith’s face, he didn’t know the significance either, as Allura had suspected. If he’d know what his dagger really was, he wouldn’t have had to ask why Allura had trusted him. “Where did you get your knife?”

The question seemed to surprise Keith, and he drew the dagger, holding it almost reverently in the palms of his hands. “It was my mother’s,” he said. “Her commanding officer brought it back to us after she died.”

As she stared down at the dagger in his hands, Allura’s heart ached. “I’m sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.” Keith’s hand closed around the hilt of the dagger, and he looked up at her. He wore the same bored scowl he usually wore, but this time Allura saw the way his eyes tightened, the subtle tilt of his ears that spoke of sorrow. When she’d first met Keith, Allura thought he kept his emotions under wraps, but the more time she spent with him, the more she saw that that wasn’t true. Keith was as guileless as Shiro in his own way; you just had to take the time to learn how to read him.

“Even so,” Allura said softly. She reached out to touch the glyph etched in the blade. “I think I would have liked to meet your mother. She must have been a good woman.”

Keith’s eyes followed the motion of Allura’s finger, his brow pinched.

“Do you know what this symbol means?” Allura asked.

“Loyalty. It’s an old character; we don’t use glyphs much anymore.” Keith looked up, searching Allura’s face. “Why would you want to meet someone who carried around her loyalty to Zarkon on her knife?”

Allura's hand stilled, and she smiled at the old, familiar rune. “Who ever said it meant Zarkon?”

Keith was silent for a long moment, his grip on the knife tightening. He stared at it, or perhaps _through_ it, his lips parted, one thumb tracing the blade's edge. Finally he found his voice. “Who else would it mean?”

“My father, King Alfor." Allura's eyes stung with unexpected tears, and she blinked a few times to clear them. "His honor guard used to carry daggers very much like the one you have.”

Keith breathed in sharply. “A _Galra_ blade?”

Allura nodded. “There has always been unrest in the universe, since long before Zarkon came to power. There were always armies invading worlds that hadn’t yet developed the weaponry to defend themselves, always plagues and famines and wild beasts terrorizing isolated settlements, always pirates who preyed on travelers. Voltron was created because of that unrest.

“My grandmother was the last Altean queen to rule over our homeworld. As Voltron grew in fame, their duties called the paladins—and my family along with them—away from Altea more often. My grandmother knew she could not both reign at home and support the paladins in their travels, so she created a senate to rule Altea, and the royal line became something more like ambassadors than true rulers. Our guards came from many worlds, drawn to serve Voltron in gratitude for all the paladins had done. As a mark of their intent, each of our guards carved their own word for _loyalty_ into their weapons. Loyalty not to one person or planet, but to the universe at large, and to Voltron’s mission within it.”

She paused, remembering her childhood aboard the Castle of Lions, traveling the stars for long stretches of time with only occasional holidays back on Altea. Days spent studying under Coran, nights with her father and the paladins, listening to their stories. Occasionally there had been battles, and Allura had stood on the bridge with Coran and her father, watching in wonder.

She was too young when the Vkullor attacked Daibazaal to remember it well, but she remembered Coran sitting with her as the castle shook, and she remembered her mother afterward, pale and still in a cryo-replenisher.

More than that, she remembered the young Galra, hardly out of childhood by his people’s standards, who came to them after the battle and introduced himself as Zarkon

 _I want to join you,_ he’d said, standing tall and proud, the wound across his cheek still fresh. He’d nodded to Rukka, then the only Galra paladin, a light of pride and ambition in his eyes. _I don’t want to be the one in need of saving ever again._

“There were Galra in your father’s guard?” Keith asked, his voice hushed.

“Several.”

“Then this knife is...” Keith uncurled his fingers and let the dagger rest on his open palm. “There’s no way it could be the same one as ten thousand years ago.”

“Perhaps not,” Allura said. “But it is a very good recreation, and not one likely to come about by coincidence. The glyph, and the style of dagger itself. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I doubt this is something you would see in just anyone’s hands.”

Slowly, Keith shook his head. “No. I never saw any others like it.”

“As I thought. I imagine Zarkon would consider this a symbol of dissent, if not outright rebellion.”

Keith frowned. “Because Alfor opposed him in the early days of the war?”

“Because Zarkon abandoned his gaurdsman’s knife the same way he abandoned the ideals of Voltron.” Allura stared at the empty space over the console where the image of the former paladins had been. “Because on the day Zarkon severed his ties with the rest of his team, he left his dagger buried in the blue paladin’s back.”

* * *

“The blue paladin stands for loyalty and empathy,” Coran said, staring out at the projected stars with his hands clasped behind him. “The Blue Lion looks for someone who takes care of others, who places a high value on relationships. Their friends, their family. The black paladin may be the one who leads the team, but the blue paladin has often acted as a second officer, uniting the paladins in the pursuit of a common goal.”

Lance stared at Coran for a long moment, then laughed, the sound thin and strained to his own ears. “Wow, okay. Yeah, I’m doing fan-freaking-tastic on that front.”

Coran placed a hand on Lance’s back, and Lance got the impression he was really weirding the guy out. The gesture normally would have been a comfort, but right now it just felt like another weight on his shoulders. Lance twisted away from it, putting as much space between himself and Coran as the small catwalk allowed.

“Seriously,” he said, his voice rising sharply. “Why the _hell_ did Blue choose me? Uniting the team? Sure! Guess that’s why we’ve been so _tight_ the last couple of days, right?” It sure as hell wasn’t _Keith_ pulling them apart. It was Lance. Lance’s temper, Lance’s personal issues with Keith, Lance’s guilt and rising panic. He’d spent the last three days feeling like he was on the verge of drowning, his dreams filled up with dead Galra who looked like Keith.

He hated it. What was Keith to him? An enemy. An annoyance. An intruder on the team who’d somehow managed to worm his way into the Red Lion’s good graces. So _why_ was the thought of him dying—dying on the blade of his own knife, clutched in Lance’s trembling hands—keeping him up at night?

Coran breathed in slowly and let out a long, heavy sigh. “You know something, Blue? Sometimes it’s the things we value most that trip us up.”

“And what’s _that_ supposed to mean?”

“The red paladin is one who trusts his instincts. That is his greatest strength. Matt chose to believe in Shiro, to trust his instincts, even when the evidence pointed to Shiro being an enemy, and as a result we found two more paladins.” Coran placed a hand on the control panel set into the railing, and the display around them shifted, showing a different star system—one Lance wished he didn’t recognize so easily. “Matt’s instincts also took us to Vel-17, and ended with you three stranded halfway across the universe.”

Lance bristled. “That wasn’t _Matt’s_ fault.”

The self-satisfied smile that appeared in the shadow of Coran’s mustache told Lance he’d played right into Coran’s hands. “Indeed. His instincts are a powerful asset to this team, but it’s going to take time for him to learn when to follow them, and _how_. The fact that he sometimes gets it wrong doesn’t make him any less the red paladin. It’s the same with you, Lance. You care about your team, and Keith’s presence has challenged the boundaries of that team.”

Lance laughed, his throat thick with emotion, and closed his eyes so Coran didn’t see just how close to home his words hit. Leave it to Coran to understand anyway. He rubbed Lance’s back, and this time Lance didn’t pull away.

“You want to keep your friends safe. You wish the universe was one in which everyone could coexist peacefully. Neither of those is a bad thing, but it does mean you’re going to be pulled in two directions, between excluding people who deserve your loyalty and trusting people who want to take advantage of your kindness.”

“People like Nyma?” Lance asked. It was easier, talking about people he hadn’t murdered. About someone who wasn’t living down the hall from him, minding his own business, just trying to get by and not realizing what his presence was doing to Lance’s conscience. It was easier not to voice his doubts about this war and his own role in it.

The motion of Coran’s hand slowed. “Mm. And people like Zarkon.”

“Zarkon?” Lance lifted his head, peering out from under his hood as Coran’s expression darkened.

“He was a paladin, before he decided to take over the universe. The blue paladin who served with him trusted him a great deal. Even after he betrayed us, even after he used the Black Lion to ravage a world that stood in the way of his ambition, she believed she could get through to him. He was a friend, and she couldn’t bring herself to fight him. The other paladins believed he’d already gone too far and that talking to him was a waste of time, but the blue paladin disagreed. She snuck out after a strategy session to meet with Zarkon alone. He killed her.”

Lance’s throat constricted. “What?”

Coran closed his eyes. “Zarkon killed the blue paladin, a woman named Lealle. She was Allura’s mother.”

* * *

“So, wait.” Keith raised his hands, confusion and frustration churning inside him. “You trusted me because I had a knife that looked like one that killed the last blue paladin?” He couldn’t stop his voice from turning sharp, and he pressed the heel of his hand to his eye in an attempt to stave off a headache.

Allura reached out toward him, and though her touch was gentle, it still burned like scalding water. “Zarkon corrupts everything he touches. The fact that someone still carries knives like yours tells me that people haven’t forgotten what Zarkon tried to destroy. Someone still fights against him. Someone still hopes for peace.” She paused, seeming to focus on something that wasn’t really there. “You remind me of the best of ours. You care, and you’re willing to fight for what you believe in. You risk your life for those who need you, and you don’t expect thanks in return.”

Keith rubbed his wrist, where he’d once worn a personal computer. Pidge had it now and was using it to gather as much intelligence from the Galra systems as they could, but for years it had served as a reminder of who and what he was. A Galra prince. A soldier. Before Shiro came along, Keith had played his part in Zarkon’s game, ignoring the voice inside that told him it was wrong. “You give me too much credit.”

A smile, bright and baffling, flickered across her face, but before she could say anything more an alarm rang. Her face sobered, and she turned to the scanners. “Go get your armor,” she said tersely. “We’re about to have company.”

* * *

Lance pressed his knuckles against his eyelids, wondering why the universe had it out for him. “Allura’s _mom_?” he asked, voice shrill. “I’m trying to stand in for Allura’s _mom?_ ”

“You’re not standing in for anyone,” Coran said. “You _are_ the blue paladin, and you’re doing an admirable job—especially considering how recently you were chosen.”

Right. Admirable. Sure. No pressure, though.

Lance knew Allura and Coran had known the previous paladins. They must have. Logically, they would have been friends. The new paladins all had big shoes to fill—but there was a big difference between replacing someone’s teammate and replacing their _mom_.

Crumpling toward the railing, Lance let out a long, low moan. Lealle. He should know her name if he was going to be obsessing over her for the next six weeks—which he was, absolutely. He knew himself, and he knew he was never able to let go of other people’s expectations, especially once they’d been laid out for him.

He took some comfort in knowing he wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to fight. Less comforting was the knowledge that Lealle had gotten herself killed because she was too trusting. In retrospect, Lance should be happy Nyma had just handcuffed him to a tree root.

There was just no winning. Choose suspicion and not only would the whole team continue hating him for treating Keith like an enemy, but he’d be betraying everything his lion stood for. Choose trust, choose to look at every Galra he crossed paths with as another ally waiting for a chance to do good, and he’d probably end up with a knife in his back.

_Good fucking luck._

“Lance?” Coran asked, sounding concerned. “What’s wrong? Honestly? You know you can talk to me, whatever it is.”

Right. Sure. That was happening. _Hey, Coran, I don’t think I’m cut out for this. Think Allura can take over with Blue so I can go have a mental breakdown in the corner? Thanks, buddy._

He was saved having to answer when a siren split the air, followed shortly by Allura’s voice.

“Paladins, to your lions! Galra ship sighted.”

Lance swore, but turned and sprinted for the door, leaving Coran behind. Of course there had to be a fight now. Of course. Not like they needed rest. They’d just been going nonstop for more than a month, risking their lives almost every day. Who couldn’t handle something like that, right?

Pidge and Shiro were already in the staging area where they all kept their uniforms, and Matt stood just inside the door, his arms crossed, a surly look on his face. Lance slowed to a stop beside him and reached out a cautious hand.

“Everything all right?”

Matt jumped, then forced a smile. “Fine.”

Lance arched an eyebrow.

“It’s nothing,” Matt said. He backed toward the door, wincing as his leg wobbled. He nearly fell, and Lance moved forward to catch him. Before it came to that, Matt found his balance and held up his hands to ward off Lance’s concern. “Guess that’s why I’m not heading out with you,” he said brightly. His eyes darted to Shiro and Pidge, who were nearly dressed. Matt’s eyes tightened. “Take care of each other out there, all right?”

Lance frowned, but at that moment Hunk arrived, nearly bowling Lance over in his haste to get to his suit. Matt laughed and steadied Lance as Hunk spun, tongue tripping over an apology.

“I’ll leave you to it,” Matt said, nodding a greeting to Shay, who had followed Hunk to the staging area. Lance glanced at her, then at Hunk, then grinned and waggled his eyebrows. Hunk scowled and threw Lance’s breastplate at him.

Shiro and Pidge were at their lions by the time Lance was finished changing, and apparently Keith had beat them all to the punch, because Red was already running interference with Galra fighters as Lance joined the fray. A single warship drifted through the empty space ahead of them, fighters swarming around it like hornets. Lance wasn’t sure what Zarkon wanted out here, considering this system was uninhabited, but if Zarkon was involved, it couldn’t be anything good.

Which meant a fight.

Lance’s stomach turned as he followed the others into the thick of it. Blue lagged behind the rest, sensing Lance’s hesitation, and she reached out her mind to him in a silent question. Patting the console, Lance pushed her faster.

“I’m a paladin,” he muttered. “I don’t get to say no to this.”

“What was that?” Shiro asked.

Lance cringed. “Nothing. Just, uh, just talking to Blue.”

“Bonding!” Coran cried, clearly ecstatic. “Wonderful idea, Blue!”

Now wasn’t the time for his crisis of conscience. His friends were out there risking their lives, and the Galra fighters weren’t exactly pulling any punches. They didn’t pose much of a threat—not as long as it was _only_ the fighters—but that didn’t give Lance the right to pull out altogether. However much they outmatched the enemy, those lasers were real, and there was a warship behind the fighters that could knock out a lion with one good hit.

Lance owed it to his friends to watch their backs. Whoever they were fighting, whatever Lance thought about the possibility of those Galra being like _their_ Galra, now wasn’t the time for halfway.

At least they were in space, where Lance didn’t have to look the enemy in the eye. At least they were up against fighters for now, who as far as Lance could tell were at least half robot-controlled. He could smash up some spare parts without feeling too much like a monster… right?

“Does anyone else think it’s confusing to call us by our lions’ colors?” Pidge asked, rolling so the next wave of lasers was absorbed by the shield on the Green Lion’s back. “I mean, how do we know if you’re talking to Lance or the Blue Lion?”

Coran hummed thoughtfully, then snapped. “Doesn’t matter! A good paladin is so closely linked with their lion the two are practically indistinguishable.”

“It _is_ a little confusing, though,” said Hunk. “I mean, what if you just said _Blue’s hit?_ There’s a big difference between the lion taking a hit and Lance taking a hit. Should I just panic every time? Because let’s be honest here, I’m probably going to panic every time.”

“Is… this how all your battles go?” Shay asked tentatively, and Hunk _eeped_ softly before shutting up all together.

Matt only laughed. “Pretty much. There’s usually more screaming, though.”

“Paladins,” Allura said. “Focus.”

“Why?” Lance asked, forcing levity. “Not like this is gonna be hard. Look at it. One puny little ship out here in the middle of nowhere? Pshaw.”

“You’re right, Lance. This should be easy.”

Lance hesitated, unease creeping down his spine. “I’m sensing a _but_ here.”

Allura sniffed primly. “Not a but. More of a _so_. This should be easy, _so…_ You’re going to form Voltron.”

There was a long silence on the comms. No one, Lance figured, wanted to be the first to complain.

Well, he wasn’t going to let Allura scare him. “You’re joking, right?”

He could practically taste Allura’s scowl in the instant of silence that followed his question. He glanced at the array of video feeds in the corner of the viewscreen—squashed and tiny with all of them up. There were two from the castle-ship now: Coran and Shay in the usual feed, probably manning the castle lasers; and Matt with Allura by the main control pedestals.

A laser clipped Blue’s back, and she snapped at Lance to focus.

_Right._

“I most certainly am _not_ joking,” Allura said curtly. “You _must_ improve your teamwork, paladins. You _must_ learn to trust each other. What better way to do that than through a practical application?”

Lance could think of several dozen  _much_ better ideas than tossing them all into a fight and telling them to make nice. Like laser tag. Or trust falls. Or, hell, two truths and a lie. Lance already had his picked out. _I’m scared out of my mind, I miss Earth, and I hate Keith._

“All right,” said Shiro, his voice carefully neutral and flawlessly professional. “You heard the princess. Let’s go.”

There were a few groans over the comms, but no real protests, and the others fell in behind Shiro without too much delay. Lance’s hands seized up on his controls, and it was pure thoughtless obedience that pulled the Blue Lion into place beside Yellow.

Blue nudged him again, that same nagging worry coursing under the surface, and Lance tried to give her the mental equivalent of a thumbs-up.

This was fine. Lance was fine. Not like the five of them hadn’t formed Voltron once before. Sure, that had been in the middle of a fight for the fate of an entire planet, and, sure, Lance hadn’t had time to worry about it before it happened, but it wasn’t like it had gone _terribly_. He could do this.

At first, it seemed like it wasn’t going to work. No one here had formed Voltron at will, technically speaking. Both on the Balmera and again on Berlou, Voltron had appeared in a moment of desperation, when all five paladins were so focused on saving someone that they didn’t have time to screw up. (It was the thinking, Lance had decided. The thinking was what got in the way. Worrying about what you were doing, worrying about what everyone else was doing. Trying to force things. It had to just sort of… _happen_.)

Lance closed his eyes, a hazy, half-formed vision of the battle around him coming to him through the filter of Blue’s eyes. He gave her a little more control of their flight as he tried to focus on what it had been like to form Voltron before. The need, the ache. The tug at his heart and the sudden rush of vertigo as five became one.

His thoughts turned to sand, running away from him in a hundred different rivulets, faster and more insistent the more he tried to hold it all together. One river carried him toward practical concerns: was this the formation they’d been in right before they formed Voltron, or had Lance been farther forward, where Pidge was now? Another river ran with thoughts of Matt and Allura back on the castle—and decidedly _not here._

The insistent click-rumble-whir of the Blue Lion’s machinery formed another thread, a sensory river that beat at Lance’s focus with all the force of Class V rapids. Then there was Keith, and that thought-river was wider and deeper and swifter than the others, for all it was calm and quiet on the surface. Keith was here. Keith the Galra, Keith who in another life might have been standing on the bridge of that warship up ahead.

At the thought of Keith, the river split again. One piece of Lance’s mind went to the warship and all the Galra it housed. He pictured them sitting down to breakfast with their kids, playing video games in the rec room, teasing each other about crushes and hair cuts and how they’d spent their last Saturday in town.

The other current eddied around thoughts of the other paladins. With his eyes closed, there was nothing to stop the images of their faces, hard and angry, judging him for the way he’d been acting. They were right to judge him, of course, but that didn’t stop it hurting.

“Come on, team. Focus. All together now.”

Shiro’s voice was meant to be encouraging, but Lance couldn’t help thinking the words were meant for him alone—and everyone else knew it.

 _The blue paladin’s supposed to be the unifier,_ Lance told himself, gritting his teeth and dragging his mind back to Voltron and the battle at hand. _Get your shit together, Lance._

He dug his nails into the palm of his hand, squeezed his eyes more tightly shut, and focused.

 _Voltron._ His mind went to Berlou, and Keith’s face when Lance had cornered him in the corridor with a warning not to hurt Lance’s team. The guy had to hate him after that, right? Lance was honestly surprised Keith had managed to hold it together during the battle that had followed—God knew Lance had had to fight tooth and nail not to fall apart.

_No._

_We’re forming Voltron. Focus on that. The Blue Lion. Hunk. Pidge. Shiro. Forget about the rest of it. Your friends need you. Stop being such a screw-up._

He felt the tug of Voltron—realized that tug had been there for a while, if he’d only managed to focus on that instead of his own issues—and let out a long, slow breath.

He could do this.

The lions drifted closer together, Blue beginning to shift, familiar _thunks_ echoing through her guts as she stopped being a lion and started being a leg. The others were out there, too, their minds swirling around his like little comets that left icy trails in their wake. He sensed Shiro first, calm and solid at the core of it all, and then Hunk, whose mind greeted Lance like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Pidge twined in and around the rest, their mind as quick as a caffeinated squirrel. Lance’s thoughts quickened in sympathy—but where Pidge’s quick-thinking had a sense of focus to it, Lance’s mind diffused as it worked itself up, reaching outward, grasping, twisting, searching, searching…

Some corner of him seemed to have forgotten that it wasn’t Matt in the Red Lion, and it faltered when it remembered Keith. There was no hostility in Keith’s mind. Wariness, maybe. A hard and smooth wall keeping Lance out in a way the others didn’t, but not open aggression.

Still Lance recoiled, the gnarled thoughts he’d been trying to keep at bay crashing back down on him in waves of guilt and worry and nauseating uncertainty.

The Blue Lion shuddered, and the other minds receded.

“Shoot!” Coran’s voice was firecracker sharp, even though Lance was pretty sure he’d meant it to be cheery and non-judgmental. (That was okay. Lance’s mind was supplying enough judgment for ten Corans.) “And you almost had it, too!”

Lance’s head pounded, and he opened his eyes to the too-bright scene of battle. The Black and Red Lions were already engaged with the fighters that had taken advantage of the distraction. Green and Yellow floundered for a moment before joining them. Laserfire seared Lance’s eyes, making them water, and he hunched over the controls, a yawning darkness in his chest threatening to crumple him.

“Try it again,” Allura ordered. “We can’t fight Zarkon until we’re certain we can form Voltron whenever we need to.”

Lance didn’t wait for the others to answer. Whatever they said, whether calm agreement or timid protest, would hit Lance just the same.

So he wheeled Blue around with a grunt of, “Screw that,” and dove into the battle in earnest. Allura started to reprimand him, but he just shut off the comms and focused on destroying as many Galra fighters as he could. (Robots, he told himself. They were only robots, and he was a paladin of Voltron.)

Pidge could have hacked his comms if they wanted to, but they didn’t, and Lance didn’t know whether to be grateful or offended that they didn’t even try to talk sense into him. Keith and Shiro and Pidge went to take out the warship, and Hunk helped Lance with the fighters, hovering nearby like he expected Lance to do something stupid and dangerous.

Well. That was fair. Lance wasn’t in any sort of mood to play it safe. He hit hard and fast with little thought for his own safety, and he didn't give up until the last fighter turned to a ball of fire and molten metal. The Blue Lion was tense with Lance’s nerves and her own concern by the time the region was silent once more.

When they returned to the castle, Lance went straight to his room, stripped, and stood in the steaming hot shower until his skin turned red and the pounding at his door went away. He only wished his thoughts were as easy to quiet.


	3. Knife's Edge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: Lance had a chat with Coran about the last blue paladin, Lealle (who just so happens to be Allura's mom), and about what the Blue Lion looks for in a paladin. Meanwhile Keith asked Allura why she trusted him and learned about old Altea, King Alfor's guards, and Zarkon's betrayal. Both conversations were cut short by the arrival of a Galra ship, but Lance's panic and guilt prevented the team from forming Voltron.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #714  
>  Dated two and a half years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Notes from examination of Ziva-X-alpha survivors, prisoner IDs 013-9872, 014-9872, 015-9872, collectively referred to hereafter as the Ziva:
> 
>  - Subjects are of a previously unclassified race, galranoid in body structure, hairless, and emaciated. They appear to be mature adults and are physically healthy aside from the effects of malnourishment. Scans indicate the Ziva possess the capacity for speech, but they have not exercised it since their arrival.

>  - Although Ziva-X-alpha bore evidence of a moderately civilized society with the Ziva’s species as the dominant lifeforms, these three subjects display intelligence and abstract reasoning skills on par with domesticated kel. Subjects do not respond to verbal commands or behavioral reinforcement, with the exception of short-lived pain aversion.

>  - Rumors that the Ziva survived without Quintessence for extended periods of time appear to be true. They have suffered no physical effects of deprivation, though the cognitive and emotional impact is severe. The Ziva in this state are irrational, unintelligent creatures with the capacity for only two emotional states: fear and rage. They seek Quintessence with a single-minded determination that overrides all sense of self-preservation, but grow defensive and withdrawn if no significant source of Quintessence presents itself. The are, in short, utterly feral.
> 
> We will need to develop new protocols for dealing with the Ziva, as the presence of even a single living being or sentry within a hundred spans is enough to trigger their insatiable hunger for Quintessence.

[Note from Pidge’s translation: An image was attached to this entry showing the Ziva. It’s pretty clear these are the things we fought on Vel-17, though this was before the cybernetic enhancements and zombification.]

* * *

Matt grunted as he blocked a blow from the gladiator. Fire shot up his leg, but he didn’t lose his balance. That was an improvement. He backed away as the gladiator advanced on him, focused on his breathing and trying to figure out the best way to end the match. It was only set to level one, but Matt had promised himself he would stick to melee combat; switching over to his pistol would make this easier, and Matt wasn’t looking for easy. He needed to push himself if he wanted to catch up to the others.

It had been more than two weeks since Berlou, and the others had been progressing steadily in their training. They made runs on Galra ships whenever they found them—three since the last time they’d tried to form Voltron—but there was still friction between Keith and Lance, and despite the exercises Allura set them, nothing seemed to make a difference.

Well, nothing except Lance leaving the room. Sometimes when he stalked off, the other paladins would keep working, and the teamwork among the four of them was improving by leaps and bounds.

Matt had tried talking to Lance several times, but Lance was surprisingly good at avoiding people when he didn’t want to talk and derailing the conversation when he did. Matt was getting worried, but there wasn’t much he could do until Lance was ready to open up to him.

So mostly he kept busy with training.

The gladiator decided it was done waiting for Matt to attack and charged him. Tensing, Matt raised his sword to block the first strike, but there was more power behind it than he’d been anticipating, and it forced him back a step, then another.

Scowling, Matt went on the offensive, knocking the gladiator’s staff aside and slashing at its chest. It retreated just far enough to give Matt room to breathe, and he shifted to come at the robot from its non-dominant side. It was the sort of thing you could only exploit on the lowest difficulty settings, but Matt wasn’t going to pass up one of the few advantages he had.

He charged, his sword held loosely at his side. The gladiator recovered from Matt’s last attack and turned, but it was slow to regain control of its staff, and Matt knew it would never block his attack in time.

His knee brace locked up, and Matt hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. His bayard reverted to its inactive form as he wheezed through clenched teeth, riding out the dull ache that reverberated throughout his body.

A shadow fell over him and he threw himself to the side just as the Gladiator brought its staff down on the floor where he’d been a second earlier. Matt coughed, trying to draw in enough breath to speak.

“End training sequence!”

Matt turned toward the voice at the door as the gladiator snapped upright and powered down. Lance stood at the edge of the training area, dressed in his armor, his helmet tapping against his leg.

Raising an eyebrow, Matt sat up and checked his armor. Several days ago, Coran had showed Matt the Altean fabricator that made new paladin armor when the old was too badly damaged to repair. _Can’t have you and Keith sharing forever,_ Coran had said brightly in response to Matt’s confusion.

In all honesty, the gesture had startled Matt, but he was grateful for the assurance that he was still a paladin. He didn’t think it had ever been a question in anyone’s mind but his own—and that only because of the way the crystal aches refused to go away, despite daily sessions with Shay to extract and redirect the growing crystals. He’d held out as long as he could on the leg brace, but he had to face facts: his leg wasn’t getting better.

He wasn’t sure how much of it was the crystals, how much the old and poorly-healed wound from his brush with the Arena, how much the fact that he’d thrown himself into battle after battle ever since his escape from Vel-17, not giving himself time to heal. In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. The cryopod might have helped, but that option was off the table until they found a more permanent solution to his crystal problem. Coran had run a scan on him, and Shay had searched for crystals in the area that might be responsible, but neither of them found anything. Coran’s best guess was nerve damage, and there was nothing to do for that but to take advantage of the cold packs and painkillers he found in the infirmary.

His leg ached most of the time, and when it didn’t ache it tingled, or burned—most of all at night, the pulsing pain keeping him up for hours—and it shook whenever he took a hit, or if he tried standing on it for too long. It wasn’t enough to significantly limit his mobility around the castle, at least not yet, but it was enough of a problem that he didn’t trust himself in battle without some kind of support.

The brace currently integrated into the leg of his armor was a prototype, Matt’s third. This one worked much better than the last attempts. It was smoother, and it kept his leg from giving out, but something in the joint kept catching. If he could figure out what, he might finally be able to get back into the action.

Lance finally crossed the room and extended a hand to help Matt to his feet. The way Lance’s gaze lingered on Matt’s leg made Matt squirm, and he turned to grab the water pouch he’d left by the wall.

“Matt...”

Matt tensed, glancing over his shoulder at Lance. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

But Lance’s eyes were still stuck on the silvery skeleton of the brace, and Matt decided he’d have to paint it to match the rest of the armor once he’d filed down whatever edge was making the brace stick. The last thing he wanted was for Shiro to see and fall back into the guilt he’d finally started to let go.

Lance was silent for the space of three heartbeats. Then he shrugged, summoned his bayard, and sighted at the inactive gladiator across the room. “So. Back to training, huh? That’s awesome.”

The words weren’t exactly sarcastic, but Matt suspected Lance was talking just to fill the silence. He seemed distracted, just as he’d seemed distracted every day for the last two weeks. Matt wanted to say something, but he wasn’t sure what, when everything he’d tried so far—from subtle hints to open concern—had gained him no ground.

“Wanna go a round with me?”

Matt blinked, surprised at the offer. He immediately berated himself for his surprise. Just because Lance didn’t want to talk didn’t mean everything between them had changed, and they’d trained together plenty of times before.

He forced a smile. “Sure. Just give me a couple minutes to futz with this.” He gestured at his leg as he sat down and pulled off his boot so he could work the brace down over his foot. “I should be done by the time you’ve finished warming up,” he said pointedly, and Lance groaned but started his stretches.

“You’re as bad as Iverson sometimes,” Lance muttered, pulling his foot up behind him. Matt spared him a brief glance—enough to see he was being half-hearted about his stretches, as usual. Lance was one of the more flexible paladins, second only to Pidge, but he had a terrible habit of shirking on his warmups.

“I just don’t want you to pull something, kiddo,” Matt said sweetly, reaching for the Altean multitool he’d borrowed from Coran. He fiddled with the touch sensor until he found the metal file, then turned his attention to the brace, flexing it a few times to see where the problem was.

Lance groaned as he switched legs. “Ugh, Matt, c’mon. I get enough of that from Shiro.”

Matt laughed, the sound startling both him and Lance. “I guess he’s finally starting to rub off on me.” There. A section of the brace’s side panel was very slightly warped. Matt had to remove the panel to get at it with his file, and as he did so he glanced up at Lance. “He’s right, though.” He pointed his multitool at Lance. “You need to take care of your body.”

“What, so I can woo the babes?” Lance asked with a cheeky grin.

Rolling his eyes, Matt went back to filing his brace. “Lance...”

Lance chuckled, but went on stretching until Matt was satisfied with the motion of his brace. He slid it up to his knee, fastened it to his thigh armor, and pulled on his boot after it, and by the time he stood up Lance was bouncing on the toes of his feet, shaking out his hands. He kept his gaze on the gladiator rather than meeting Matt’s eyes, which only reinforced Matt’s suspicions that something was bothering Lance.

He didn’t demand answers. Not yet. If nothing else, the last two weeks had taught Matt that pressuring Lance accomplished nothing. He had to be patient.

“Ready?” Matt asked, testing his stability and range of motion as he joined Lance on the training room floor. Lance nodded, and Matt summoned his bayard. The sword settled into his hand with a comfortable weight, and Matt dropped into a crouch. “Begin training level three.”

Lance opened fire the second the gladiator came to life, stunning it long enough for Matt to close the distance. They’d trained together often enough to fall into familiar patterns. Matt led the gladiator around the room, darting in close to catch its attention before retreating so Lance had room to shoot.

They took it slow for this first round, for although Matt was somewhat out of practice with combat, the paladins had progressed steadily in their training since they’d first left Earth. Lance likely could have handled a level three gladiator on his own—Matt, too, if not for the crystals and the new knee brace—so with both of them fighting it, it wasn’t much of a challenge.

Matt took the opportunity to test the limits of his brace. Back at the Garrison, his research had mostly focused on synthetic neural networks, and the Alteans were fairly advanced on that front. With a little help from Coran, Matt had managed to route the brace through the armor’s neural interface, which Matt hadn’t realized existed until a few days ago. The paladins had mostly used the manual controls for the comms and scanners so far, but apparently it could all be controlled with a thought.

It had taken some practice to get it to work for him, but once Matt had figured it out, he’d incorporated the brace into the system so that it responded to his thoughts. The brace, too heavy with the extra armor to work as a manual brace, flexed in time with his knee, offering support without creating additional resistance.

And it worked well, even if it wasn’t perfect yet. The gladiator had tossed Matt once, and though he landed on his feet, the impact had jarred his knee—and certainly if he took a direct hit to the leg his brace wouldn’t do him any good.

But he was up, and he was fighting, and if he wasn’t quite as fast as he had been, that could be attributed to two weeks without training and the lingering fatigue from the crystal sickness.

By unspoken agreement, Lance and Matt drew out the sparring match, practicing maneuvers Lance had been learning with Shiro and the others, moves Matt had studied but not yet been able to put into action. Eventually one of Lance’s shots found the gladiator’s eye, and while it floundered, blinded, Matt moved in to finish it off.

It fell to the ground in two pieces and dissolved, and Matt turned to Lance, grinning.

“You’re getting good, hotshot.”

Lance blinked, puffing up a little at the praise. “You think?” He rubbed the back of his helmet, his fingers restless on the handle of his bayard. His eyes drifted to the water pouches waiting at the edge of the room. “Eh, it’s just cause you’re here.”

“Hey.” Matt gave Lance’s shoulder a gentle push. “Don’t be so down on yourself.”

“I’m not,” Lance said. “It’s just… nice. Training with you again. You’re easy to work with.”

It was as close as Lance was going to come to a confession, and Matt watched him silently, trying to figure out how to respond. He knew Lance was talking about Keith—everyone in the castle knew that. It didn’t matter what teams they tried. Pairs, trios, all together—if Lance and Keith were supposed to work together, things fell apart. Every time.

This was less about Lance being glad to train with Matt and more about Keith not being here.

Matt frowned. “How have you been?”

The look Lance shot him wasn’t exactly guilty, but it came close. “Who, me?” Lance gave an exaggerated shrug. “You know. Keeping busy.”

“Right.” Matt resisted the urge to cross his arms. _Don’t turn this into an interrogation._ “Are you okay, though? You seem… tense lately.”

Lance’s shoulders inched upward, and Matt fell silent. So far he’d been unable to pinpoint what it was that had Lance acting so weird. It was more than distrust of Keith. For a while Matt had thought it was resentment over Keith “replacing” Matt on the team, but that didn’t feel right, either. Lance had been quieter than usual, when he wasn’t picking fights with Keith, and even when he cracked jokes, they felt forced.

As close as they were now, Matt could see dark circles under Lance’s eyes and a sallow cast to his skin, like he’d been losing sleep. Over what, though?

Cautiously, Matt raised a hand to Lance’s shoulder, but the touch made Lance flinch, and he pulled away, activating his bayard. “Another round?” he asked brightly, and before Matt could answer, Lance stepped forward. “Begin training level five.”

“Lance--”

Matt didn’t have time to protest. Level five gladiators were intense. Not unbeatable, but way above level three in difficulty. Shiro was the only one who could match it solo, and that only for a few minutes; he and Keith were so far the only pair able to beat it without taking a beating. Maybe Matt and Lance together could take it down—as long as Matt’s body obeyed him—but it wasn’t going to be an easy thing.

There was nothing to do but get in there and try to keep Lance from getting himself killed.

The first attack threatened to knock the bayard from Matt’s hands, but he managed to hold on, stumbling back from the gladiator as Lance opened fire. The gladiator was faster than the level three version, though, and only one shot connected with the robot’s shoulder, hardly slowing it as it pursued Matt across the room.

He had to focus. If he kept running away like this, he was going to end up cornered. So he planted his feet, waited for the staff to swing, then rolled forward and slashed at the gladiator’s back as he rose. It barely flinched.

A burst of laserfire caught the side of its head as it turned, drawing its eye to Lance, who grinned and shot again.

Matt charged before the gladiator could decide to make Lance its target, and the gladiator caught his sword with its staff. They stood at stalemate for an instant before the gladiator dropped low and swept Matt’s feet out from under him. He stumbled, trying to stay upright, but the butt of the gladiator’s staff caught him in the gut.

He landed hard near the wall, dropping his bayard as he rolled to a stop, wheezing. He allowed himself only a moment to absorb the pain before he was moving again, searching for his bayard as he dragged himself upright. A level five gladiator was not something you wanted to meet flat on your back.

Across the room, Lance was shooting at the gladiator and calling out insults, for all the good that did. If the Alteans had programmed their robots to recognize and respond to insults, they certainly didn’t understand human ones. Still, the gladiator was well and truly distracted by the constant stream of lasers coming at it from the back of the room, which gave Matt a chance to catch his breath and snatch up his bayard.

He looked up just in time to see Lance freeze, his eyes riveted on the door.

Then the gladiator was there, swinging its staff in an attack that sent Lance flying backward into the wall. Matt called an end to the training sequence before it could do any more damage and rushed to Lance’s side.

“I’m fine,” Lance grunted. He pushed Matt away as soon as he was back on his feet, and raised his head to glare at the door.

Belatedly, Matt realized they had company. Keith stood just inside the room, his hand gripping the door frame, his lips pressed together into a thin line. Matt felt a reflexive surge of fear and dark memories from the corner of his mind reserved for Vel-17, but his lapse in control lasted only an instant before he shut the scars away.

“Hey,” Keith said in what was clearly meant to be a disarming voice. “Didn’t mean to distract you. Is it all right if I join?”

Matt glanced at Lance, who had gone rigid. The hand gripping his bayard uncurled, and the weapon vanished in a flash of white light. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever. I was just about to hit the showers anyway.”

He was gone before Matt—or Keith—could ask him to stay.

* * *

“Are you sure I should be here?” Shay asked, her voice muted by the metal all around Hunk.

He pushed off the Yellow Lion’s hull, and the hoverboard he lay on slid out into open air. “Of course you should be here. Why shouldn’t you be here?”

Shay looked up at him, somber, from her position atop the Yellow Lion’s paw, but her expression morphed into a grin that she quickly hid behind her hand. Grimacing, Hunk found a rag nearby to wipe his face with. Two days ago, they’d followed a distress beacon to a Galra-controlled planet wrapped in what they’d all assumed to be an enormous dust storm. The storm part was right, but the “dust” was actually some kind of fungus that had wormed its way past Yellow’s armor plating. Yesterday all of the paladins had spent a good three hours cleaning their lions, and at this point Hunk doubted the gunk posed any actual threat to Yellow’s performance, but if _he’d_ had a bunch of pureed mushrooms shoved inside _his_ armor, he’d want more than just a quick power-wash.

Of course, it wasn’t exactly clean work. He’d found an old Altean engineer’s jumpsuit, so at least his regular clothes were still intact. (Lance had managed to make them each an extra casual outfit or two—even Shiro by this point—but clothes that weren’t skin-tight Altean spandex were still a precious commodity around the castle.)

But his hands were coated in sticky orange-ish sludge up to the elbow, and he was pretty sure he’d left more than a few sludge-streaks across his face. It was _hot_ inside a lion, and Hunk couldn’t work with sweat dripping into his eyes.

“My apologies,” said Shay, when she’d regained her composure. “You look like my brother after he tried to teach the young ones how to paint.”

Hunk laughed as he sat up, stretching his stiff back. After three hours of this, he was ready for a break. He tugged on the hose he’d been using to flush out Yellow’s interior and washed as much of the fungus off his hands as he could.

“Seriously, though,” he said, searching for a clean towel to dry off with. “You’re always welcome here.”

“Truly?” Shay leaned back against Yellow’s leg, staring up at her face. She was sleeping now, or whatever the robot equivalent was. Her presence was nothing more than a whisper in Hunk’s mind, and though she was aware of what was happening around her, she made no move to interact. Shay tilted her head to the side. “In our stories, the bond between lion and paladin is a sacred one, and to intrude upon that bond is deepest offense.”

Hunk shrugged. “I mean, I guess when we first found them they were pretty picky about who got to come near them. Back on Earth, I couldn’t get through Blue’s shield. She only responded to Lance. And they’ll only let their paladin pilot them. Except I guess Allura’s kind of an exception, since she’s the princess or something? I dunno. And _no one_ knows what’s up with Red picking two paladins.” He paused, shook his head. He’d given himself enough headaches puzzling over that one already. “But I mean, in general? Nah. We’ve given plenty of people rides in our lions before. As long as you aren’t trying to hurt us, she’s pretty chill.”

Shay pressed the palm of her her hand to Yellow’s paw and smile. “Yes,” she said. “She reminds me of home.”

“Yeah?” Hesitating for just a moment, Hunk reattached the hull panel he’d removed for cleaning, then went to sit on Yellow’s other front paw, facing Shay. “You must miss it.”

Shay lowered her gaze. “I do. I do not regret my decision to accompany you, but I miss my family.”

Blowing out a long breath, Hunk stared at the ceiling. “You’re in good company there. I think we all miss home—except Keith, I guess, but that’s just because the Galra were never really his family to begin with. It gets easier.”

He wondered—not for the first time—how his parents were doing. Did they think he was dead, or had some version of the real story somehow made it all the way to Hawaii? Were they looking for him? Part of him hoped they were, but mostly he just hoped they weren’t hurting too much because of him.

“The universe is a vast place. I did not realize that before.” Shay paused, wrapping her arms around her knees. “At home I would lie beneath the stars and think about the people who lived among them. I marveled at the size of the sky, and yet… It all seemed so much smaller with the Balmera beneath my back. Out here is darkness all around, and the stars are still as far away as before, and then I see the Alteans’ map and I wonder if there is an end to the universe at all.”

Hunk closed his eyes. He knew what Shay meant. It had hit him in bits since leaving Earth. The distance. The solitude. After Lance, Allura, and Matt had disappeared from Vel-17, while the castle-ship was docked with the resistance ship _Hope of Kera_ , Hunk had sat alone on the bridge staring at the map. Pidge was certain, even then, that the others had survived, and Hunk had wanted to believe them—but staring at that endless sphere of stars, he’d wondered how any two people were supposed to find each other in space.

“You want to know the truth?” Hunk met Shay’s eyes for a brief moment before turning his attention to the toolkit beside him. He picked up a pair of pliers and fidgeted with them as he spoke. “I’m not sure how much of a difference we can really make in this war.”

“But… you are Voltron. You freed my people. You saved Berlou.”

“Yeah,” said Hunk. “And how many other planets do you think the Galra Empire conquered while we did that? There are so many of them, and they’ve taken over so many planets. We could fight for the rest of our lives and not even make a dent in Zarkon’s power.”

Shay was silent for a long while, and Hunk wondered if he should have just kept his insecurities to himself. Shay probably didn’t need more reasons to regret leaving home.

He sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “This is why I don’t like thinking about the big picture. As long as I focus on what’s in front of me I’m fine. Mostly. I have to focus on the Balmeras and the Berlous of the universe. I have to protect the people I can. I don’t know how far it will take me, but even if it doesn’t put an end to Zarkon, it helps one planet. One people. That’s not worthless.”

“Then I will do the same.”

Hunk looked up in surprise and found Shay smiling. “What?”

"I am not strong like you,” she said. “I am not a warrior, nor am I so great a healer that I can help you in a way your cryopods cannot do better. In truth, I had begun to wonder whether I belonged here at all.” She squared her shoulders. “But I can help Matt, and that is not worthless either.”

“Yeah!” Hunk grinned at her, and her eyes glowed in response. “And hey, maybe if we stick it out long enough, we’ll both find out we can do more good than we thought.”

“Perhaps so. I look forward to finding out.”

* * *

“I must be doing something wrong,” Allura said. She was supposed to be helping Coran sort through the distress beacons in the area to find their next target, but concentration was hard to come by when her mind kept returning to other problems.

It had been two movements since Keith and Shiro joined the team. Two movements—a little more than two Earth weeks, according to Matt, and Allura was trying to adapt to their time system. It was easier that way than trying to get them all to remember the difference between a standard cycle and a planetary cycle, or between a movement and a circuit (though she wasn’t certain why that was so confusing to them. The Altean system was much more straight-forward than Earth’s inconsistent notion of _months_.)

Two weeks and two days from Berlou, and Allura was mostly comfortable speaking in Earth units—but the new team of paladins was still having troubles of their own.

She noticed Coran giving her an odd look and flushed, turning her eyes back to the stellar map she was reviewing. “The paladins,” she clarified. “They still haven’t been able to form Voltron.”

“They’re adjusting,” Coran said. He was, as usual, doggedly optimistic. Allura thought he could stand to be a little more worried about the state of Team Voltron, considering they were the main force standing against Zarkon’s army, but she appreciated having someone aboard the castle-ship who believed things would work out.

“They’ve had two weeks. They should have made _some_ progress by now.” Maybe Allura should try some new team bonding exercises. The pressure of combat training only served to raise tensions between Keith and Lance, and almost everything else they’d tried lent itself too much to competition. She doubted Lance would ever admit to his rivalry with Keith, but she’d seen it at work. Keith pushed himself in everything he did, whether out of pride or in an attempt to prove himself worthy of his position, and Lance refused to be outdone.

Maybe if Allura set them different tasks, got them to work beside each other without the chance for direct competition?

Coran’s hands stilled on his control panel. A moment later he powered off the display and turned toward Allura, stroking his mustache. “Two weeks isn’t a lot of time, Princess,” he said. “I know you’re used to the way things ran under your father, but we’d had centuries to figure it out by that time. My grandfather told me stories about the first time a new paladin joined the team. Took them two seasons to work out the kinks.”

“We don’t _have_ two seasons,” Allura snapped. “Zarkon isn’t going to sit back and wait while we figure out how to be a team. Sooner or later we’re going to face a challenge the lions can’t beat as they are.”

“And perhaps that’s when these pipsqueaks will learn to set aside their differences.”

Allura sighed, rubbing her temples. The stellar map vanished the instant her hands left the control pedestals, and the bridge lights hit her like a spotlight. “I’m the princess of Altea,” she said heavily. “I’m supposed to guide the paladins toward their true potential. If I can’t help them become a team, then what good am I?”

Coran crossed to where she stood and placed his hands on her shoulders. It was a grounding weight, and it made Allura feel silly for her outburst. “You have already done a great deal for this team, Allura. You can’t blame yourself for this little spat between Lance and Keith.” He hesitated, eyes wandering to the blue paladin’s station. “We can’t help him until he’s ready to be helped.”

“But...” Allura stopped herself. The problem of leadership was hers to bear; Coran had his own duties to manage, and he didn’t need Allura adding her own doubts to his burden. There was a way to encourage reconciliation between her paladins. There had to be. She just had to find it.

Her thoughts strayed to the computer core one floor below the bridge. It was a dark, dusty room, artificially chilled to protect the equipment it contained. She could…

No. She hadn’t been to that room since her mother’s death, and she wasn’t yet desperate enough to change her habits now. She would find a way to help the paladins on her own.

* * *

Akira Shirogane occupied a unique position at the Galaxy Garrison. He was not a soldier, officially, but he’d worked as a cargo pilot servicing military outposts. He knew how to use a gun and carried a Glock 26 at all times, but he’d only ever fired it on the range. He taught flight classes for the cargo pilot cadets, but he was the youngest member of the faculty.

And, of course, he was the twin brother of Takashi Shirogane, legendary pilot, whose reputation still caused a stir among cadets and colleagues, despite his apparently fatal error on the Kerberos mission.

The end result was someone who was both respected and dismissed, well-known but almost completely ignored. He didn’t have unlimited clearance, but he’d found he could push his luck far enough that he might as well have.

For example: the command center. Technically speaking, Akira wasn’t authorized to be here, at least not without a superior officer accompanying him.

But he’d spent the first month of his tenure as flight instructor chasing down every excuse he could find to get inside. He volunteered to assist with data compilation, and he’d played up his “field experience” delivering sensitive cargo in order to join an administrative task force reviewing communication standards between central command and field agents.

In a month, he’d been to the command center twelve times with five different escorts. He’d memorized the access codes the first time and later passed them along to Val, but now—two days after Val had planned to sneak into the command center—was the first time Akira was going in solo.

He watched the entrance for an hour beforehand, keeping a running of list of who was inside as officers came and went. He waited to be sure no fewer than three of his usual escorts were inside before he made his move.

The guard today was Will Hauerbeck, who had been a year behind Akira in training. They’d worked together directly only a few times, but Will had been a familiar face even before Akira had taken the instructor position. The guard station here outside the command center was one of Will’s usual posts, so he’d seen Akira come and go several times before.

So when Akira came up just behind a group of senior officers—none of them Akira’s usual escorts—Will greeted him with a nod, checked his ID, and waved him through.

Akira followed the group toward the sturdy metal bunker that housed the entrance to the underground command center, careful to stay at the back of the group and out of their line of sight—but not so far back that outside observers would realize Akira wasn’t one of them.

For their part, the officers noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Those who spotted him in the corner of their vision dismissed him as irrelevant. They would recognize him; not by name, maybe, but by sight. Akira had seen each of them inside the command center on multiple occasions, even carried on conversations with two of the five.

Once inside and out of Will Hauerbeck’s sight, Akira split off from his unwitting escorts. There was a certain safety to sticking with a crowd—he was far more likely to be recognized as out of place on his own and obviously without an escort—but following people whose business he didn’t share was just as sure to get him noticed.

He headed first for the communications hub, where he’d spent most of his time. Val had seemed interested in it, though she wasn’t exactly one for military-grade planning. She could have gone anywhere once she was inside, so Akira would have to be thorough. The hub was in some ways the safest place for Akira; he was a familiar face there, and there was a good chance everyone would assume he was there on his usual business.

At the same time, if anyone here would know for a fact Akira wasn’t scheduled to be in the command center today, it would be one of the officers in that room.

_Well, then. Better make this quick._

Akira keyed in the access code and held his breath.

The room was crowded as usual, a low chatter of voices drowning out the sound of Akira’s entrance. A few people looked over, but no one Akira was worried about. He faded quickly into the crowd, making a quick loop of the room.

The hard part was not knowing what he was looking for. Proof that Val had been here—but that could be anything. A physical clue, signs of a struggle, whispers of an intruder. Akira kept his ears open and surveyed the whole room as he made his way around. The chatter was more of the usual. Construction on a new base in the Andes was behind schedule; the first shipment of something had arrived safely at its destination; enemy chatter had been detected and decoded and, in lieu of any time-sensitive information, was being passed along the normal channels.

The conversations filtered in one ear and out the other, but Akira barely registered them long enough to confirm that they had nothing to do with Val. He saw no new damage to the fixtures in the room, no blood or scuff marks from a fight. The room was too crowded to do a thorough sweep for physical evidence, but Akira was confident enough in saying that Val had not been accosted here.

As quickly as he’d come, Akira slipped back out into the hallway. He moved quickly and purposefully through the command center—a small structure, pared down to the bare essentials: communications hub, planning room, a few workrooms for code-breakers, private conferences, and the like, and Commander Iverson’s office.

There were voices at the planning room door, muffled by the metal, so Akira moved on to the workrooms. All empty, all uninteresting.

Maybe Val hadn’t come here, after all.

It was outside Iverson’s office that Akira found what he’d been looking for—and his heart promptly dropped straight through the floor.

If he hadn’t been looking for it, he would have missed it. A slight scratch in the polished concrete floor, a bit of black plastic casing pressed up against the wall where the broom couldn’t reach it. Akira glanced around quickly to ensure he was alone, then snatched it up.

It was a small fragment of a larger object, only a little bigger than Akira’s thumbnail with uneven edges where the casing had shattered.

It could have come from anything. A pen, a radio, a flashlight. Without the rest of the casing to compare it to, no judge would give it the time of day. But Akira knew. How many times had Val waved her “decoy digital recorder” in his face? He recognized the textured ridges that lined the top edge of the recorder. It was the right color, the right kind of plastic.

Val had been here. She’d been right here, outside Iverson’s door, and her recorder had been broken—or it had fallen with enough force to snap off a piece of casing, which was just as suspicious. The fact that she’d had the decoy out at all said she’d found something, she’d been caught, and she was trying to save whatever file she’d had on her phone.

Footsteps sounded on the far side of Iverson’s office door, and Akira’s pulse quickened in anticipation of a fight.

 _No._ He forced himself to back down. Punching Iverson in the jaw—as satisfying as it would be—wouldn’t bring Val back. It wouldn’t save those three cadets, assuming they were still alive to _be_ saved. It certainly wouldn’t end with Akira somewhere he could dig up any more info for Karen.

Akira curled his fingers around the bit of broken casing as he backed away from the door. Iverson would pay. Whatever he’d done to Val, to her cousin and the rest of his squad. Whatever hand he’d had in the Kerberos disaster, Akira would make him pay. Just not here and now.

Gritting is teeth, Akira turned and hurried back to the stairs up to the exit. Karen was waiting to hear back from him, and the woman was stressed enough with just Val missing. She didn’t need Akira going and getting himself silenced, too. He’d have to find an excuse to go into town tonight. The news he had to deliver wasn’t the sort of thing you sent over Skype, and Akira didn’t trust the rest of the Garrison staff enough to risk someone overhearing a phone call.

Akira nodded to Will on his way out the gate, already contemplating how best to tell Karen and Eli what he’d found.

* * *

Shiro lay on the couch in the rec room, Matt’s head on his chest. A comfortable silence surrounded them in the kind of drowsy warmth that reminded Shiro of summer vacations on Earth. Matt propped his chin on the back of his hand and reached up with the other to tease Shiro’s bangs.

“I missed you,” Matt said.

Shiro trapped Matt’s hand against his cheek. “You found me more than two weeks ago,” he said, amused.

Matt grinned. “So? It’s still true.”

Shaking his head, Shiro closed his eyes, and Matt went back to playing with his hair. “Hey, Matt?”

“Mm?”

“Remember when we were training for the Kerberos mission and we had to do that wilderness survival drill?”

“And Dad made friends with that twenty-foot rattler?”

Shiro cracked his eyes open. “It wasn’t a rattler,” he said. “And it was, like, three feet.”

“You didn’t see it curled up in his sleeping bag.”

“No, but for some reason _I_ was the one who got it out of camp, even though both of you are biologists.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “Yeah, microbiology and biomechanical engineering. There’s a reason we aren’t herpetologists, Takashi.”

“Yeah, okay.” Shiro stretched his arms over his head. “That’s not what I was going to say, anyway.”

“Oh? Then what?”

Before Shiro could answer, he felt the pressure of eyes on the back of his head, as though someone were watching him, though he was almost certain he and Matt were alone in the rec room. Curious, he tilted his head back.

The figure across the room made him sit upright, fear closing around him like an icy fist. It had been weeks since he’d seen them—orange-skinned, blunt-faced, their four arms withered down to little more than skin and bones. Their eyes were sunken pits in their face, but they stared at him with hostility that filled the room like smoke.

“Deyra?”

_You killed us._

It wasn’t a voice. Or at least, Deyra’s mouth didn’t move. Telepathy? No, that didn’t work with outsiders. The words still carried the force of a laser blast behind them, and Shiro closed his eyes, fighting for calm.

“Deyra...” He paused, floundering. “I’m sorry.”

_You doomed us. We died for your arrogance._

Shiro flinched. A hand closed around his arm, tight enough to bruise.

He spun, ready for a fight, but it was only Matt, hunched over, his breath ragged with pain. “Shiro...”

“Matt!” Shiro reached out for him, but Matt knocked his hand aside. His skin flashed metallic in the light, and Shiro forgot how to breathe.

Slowly, Matt uncurled. Patches of his skin had turned to crystal, smooth and reflective, and blood oozed from the places where crystal met skin. When he raised his head to look at Shiro, it was almost unrecognizable. One hazel eye, bloodshot and underscored by dark, bruised skin, stared at him. Everything else had rotted away, leaving only a crystalline skull staring at Shiro in silent accusation.

* * *

Shiro jolted out of his dream, his heart pounding in his throat as the real world reasserted itself. He lay face down on his bed, stiff and disoriented, the room around him lit with a dim glow. It came back to him in pieces: the Castle of Lions. Black. The morning’s training, an exercise in frustration exacerbated by his fatigue. Returning to his room for a nap.

The back of his neck itched with the lingering trace of Deyra’s gaze, and when he calmed enough to move, he sat up, rubbing the sensation away. His breath still sounded loud to his own ears, and he reached for the bedside clock to give himself something to focus on beside his dream.

Once the numbers swam into view and his sluggish thoughts managed to switch over to castle time, he groaned and flopped backward, pulling his pillow over his face. Less than two hours. He’d barely slept last night—barely slept more than three or four hours a night since coming to the castle ship. It wasn’t always nightmares that kept him up. More often, it was the strange, quiet sounds of the castle, the softness of his bed, the silence around him. He could hardly remember a time when he couldn’t hear someone else near him—his fellow prisoners, the sentries who patrolled the lower decks, Keith.

It wasn’t that Shiro didn’t appreciate the privacy, but the solitude left him on edge. He’d gotten used to having an ally within arm’s reach at all times.

But that attitude was just another holdover of the Champion, who lived each day surrounded by his enemies. It didn’t belong here, where his fellow paladins slept just beyond his door. Where Zarkon couldn’t touch him. Where Haggar couldn’t reach inside his mind and take control.

Shiro tensed again at the thought, then forced himself to breathe. He tossed the pillow aside and stood, crossing to the small closet where he kept his clothes—Altean jumpsuits in a variety of styles, along with two shirts, a jacket, and something like blue jeans that Lance had made of material he’d found on one of the planets they’d liberated.

With this nap, he was up to nearly five hours of sleep in the last twenty-four, which was becoming the new normal. His limbs felt like lead, but that would clear once he was up and moving—and after that dream, he wouldn’t be finding rest again any time soon.

He needed to talk to Allura about the override Haggar had built into his arm, anyway.

Grabbing the jeans and a plain black shirt, Shiro headed for the shower as he debated how to phrase his confession. He should have told her at once, of course, especially after Haggar had taken him over during the fight for Berlou. The others avoided talking about it, but Shiro knew he’d attacked the Blue Lion. Lance hadn’t been hurt—thank god—but if it happened again, Shiro might not be so lucky.

He ought to just say it. No excuses, no justifications for keeping quiet. It was tactics, simple as that. Allura needed to know.

But when he emerged from the shower, dressed, and left his room, he didn’t head straight to the bridge, where Allura spent most of her time. The dream hung in the back of his mind, and his feet carried him first to Matt’s room, next door to Shiro’s own. Matt wasn’t there, of course. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he’d probably be training, or up in the workroom he and Hunk had claimed on the eighth floor.

Shiro lingered outside Matt’s room for a moment anyway, rubbing the back of his neck. He hadn’t dreamed of Deyra and the other Yaltians since his first night on Berlou. There had been too many other fears and regrets filling up the long nights, and joining the paladins had raised his mind out of that darkness to a much healthier place.

But he couldn’t erase the last year altogether, and the fact was he’d doomed Yaltin. It was there that he and Keith had first taken a stand against the Galra army, and they’d pushed too hard. They hadn’t come close to winning the war, but they’d dragged it on long enough that Zarkon deemed the planet not worth the cost.

Once Haggar was done, all that remained was a dead planet, three quarters of a million corpses, and the dreams.

Shiro finally found Matt on the training deck, where he was sparring with Keith. Surprised, Shiro watched them from the doorway. Keith was clearly the superior swordsman, but Matt was holding his own. He knew when to retreat, and more than once he caught Keith by surprise with a ripost. Keith, as usual, seemed incapable of defensive fighting. He’d always been the sort to rush in and overwhelm the enemy before they could attack. He was quick enough to dodge, but he always followed up with another attack—and Matt knew how to use that to his advantage, leading Keith around the room and waiting for the right moment to strike.

The fight ended without a verbal signal, Matt and Keith deactivating their weapons simultaneously, nodding to each other, then turning toward the towels and water waiting by the door.

Matt saw Shiro first and broke into a grin. “Shiro!”

Keith looked up, his posture relaxing almost imperceptibly as he nodded a greeting. “Come to train?”

“Maybe later,” Shiro said, letting his eyes linger on Matt as he grabbed his water pouch. The last traces of Shiro’s dream faded to vapor at the sight of him, bright and healthy and grinning a teasing grin as he leaned against the wall near Shiro.

“What’s the matter? Scared?”

Shiro laughed. “I just took a shower,” he said. “Give me an hour to feel civilized before I get all sweaty again.”

Matt shrugged, grabbing a wet cloth from the refresher on the wall and wiping his face and neck. Its effectiveness was debatable, considering Matt was dressed in the paladin armor—unlike Keith, who ignored the refresher entirely and simply wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his Altean jumpsuit.

“I didn’t know you two had started training together,” Shiro said. Aside from Lance, everyone in the castle had more or less accepted Keith’s presence, but they didn’t exactly hang out. Keith sometimes sat with Hunk at meals, spent an hour or so every few days with Pidge translating the research logs they’d recovered from Vel-17, and otherwise mostly stuck with Shiro or retreated to his room or the training deck to be alone.

It was nice to see him getting along with Matt like this.

Some of Shiro’s pleasure faded in the silence that followed his statement. Keith flashed a smile as he nursed his water pouch, but Matt seemed suddenly preoccupied with wiping down every inch of exposed skin. By the time Keith joined them, Matt was all smiles once more, but this time Shiro saw the tension around his eyes—slight, but present.

Shiro frowned at him, but Matt just grabbed his hand and pulled him out into the corridor.

“I don’t know about you two, but I’m starved. Wanna grab some food goo?”

Keith shrugged and fell into step on Shiro’s other side, and Shiro glanced between them, trying to figure out what he was missing.

It was while he had his eyes on Keith—calm, relaxed, and seemingly oblivious to Matt’s half-concealed tension—that Pidge appeared swiftly and silently in the space between Shiro and Matt.

“So how long have you two been dating?”

“Pidge!” Matt cried, red creeping into his face. “What the hell?”

They crossed their arms and gave him a look of thin patience. “What do you mean _what the hell_ ? You’re the one who took your secret boyfriend to space without telling me! Seriously, Matt. _Lance_ knew before I did! I deserve details. Was that why he always came over for dinner? Were you just waiting for me to leave the room before you started making out? Did _Mom_ know?”

“What exactly do you think—Why would--” Matt looked up suddenly, as though remembering Shiro and Keith were still present. Shiro did his best not to smile (openly) as, beside him, Keith leaned forward with interest, watching the exchange around Shiro’s shoulder. Matt flushed crimson and covered his face in his hands. “ _Now,_ Pidge?”

Pidge shrugged. “I got stuck with the decryption on the Vel-17 notes. This seemed like a good distraction.”

A laugh slipped past Shiro’s guard, and Pidge turned curious eyes on him.

“You wanna pony up, Shiro, or do I have to drag it out of my brother?”

Shiro arched an eyebrow and hummed thoughtfully. Then, crossing his arms, he glanced at Matt, who looked vaguely guilty. “ _Are_ we dating?” Shiro asked in a teasing tone. "Officially?”

A grin tugged at Matt’s smile, but he wiped it away as Pidge turned back to him. He scratched his chin, giving a good show of mulling the question over.

Maybe he _was_ thinking it over. Despite everything they’d been through, neither of them had ever actually put a name to their relationship. At first they’d had the excuse of being crewmates for the Garrison, where romantic entanglements were forbidden. Then they’d been separated, and these last couple weeks had been too busy for deep talks like that.

Well, that and Shiro hadn’t been able to work up the courage to ask Matt how far he wanted this to go.

Matt’s expression softened now, and he reached an arm behind Pidge’s back to squeeze Shiro’s hand. “Yes,” he said, a little too earnestly to pass off as teasing Pidge. “I think we are.”

Warmth spread through Shiro’s chest, and he offered Pidge a genuine smile. “There you go,” he said. “We’ve been dating for about five seconds now.”

Pidge’s head lolled back, and they let out a long, frustrated groan.

“Unofficially, then.” Keith spoke smoothly, sounding almost bored with the conversation, but Shiro didn’t miss the smirk he wore, or the devious grin it won from Pidge.

Shiro flicked Keith’s ear, then shrugged, leading the others around a corner toward the elevator. “It’s been building for a long time, maybe since we were assigned to the Kerberos mission, but you know how the Garrison is about that sort of thing.”

“Not really,” Keith said. Shiro gave him a hard look, wondering if he was being deliberately difficult, but Keith’s face gave nothing away.

“Let’s just say they wouldn’t have liked it,” Matt said. “We tried to pretend there was nothing between us, but...”

Shiro pressed the call button and leaned against the wall, smiling at Matt. “I was weak,” he said, adding just enough dramatics to make Matt snort and Pidge laugh aloud. The elevator arrived, and Shiro ushered the others inside. “About a month before we left, I told Matt how I felt. I guess you could say that’s when our relationship started, but we wanted to keep it low-key until the end of the mission.”

“We were planning on telling you,” Matt said to Pidge. “The day after we got home, once Iverson couldn’t get pissy about it. It just… didn’t work out that way.”

The mood in the elevator turned grim, but Shiro took a deep breath to dispel the tension in his spine. He reached out to ruffle Pidge’s hair, eliciting a squawk of protest. “And no,” he said. “Your mom didn’t know. I think Commander Holt figured it out, but we didn’t specifically tell him. Matt wanted you to be the first to know.”

Pidge looked up as they combed their hair, darted a glance at Matt, who was still faintly pink from the attention, then tilted their head to one side to study Shiro. After a moment they nodded, as though coming to some decision.

“Okay,” they said. “You can stay.”

“Oh?” Shiro raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize banishment was on the table.”

Pidge jabbed him in the hip with their elbow. “Hey, you remember how you got drunk on New Year’s Eve when we had you over? Yeah, I’ve got stories I’m sure Keith would love to hear.”

From the look on Keith’s face, he would very much like to hear stories about Shiro’s drunken escapades, which struck Shiro as a risky business when he himself could only half remember them. Something about foosball and a Disney sing-along. Shiro held his hands up in surrender just as the elevator let them out on the third floor.

“Fair enough,” he said with as much dignity as he could muster when Matt was laughing into his hand and Keith’s gaze was burning a hole in the side of his head.

Pidge worried their lip for a second, then wrapped their arms around Shiro’s middle. “I’m glad Matt has you,” they whispered, then pulled back and started toward the kitchens at a sprint.

Shiro stared after them, surprise melting into a small smile, as Keith and Matt followed Pidge at a more leisurely pace.

The moment was interrupted by a chime overhead. “Paladins,” came Allura’s voice. “We’ve identified a distress beacon in the area. We’re going to check it out. Everyone get to your lions.”

Shiro held in a groan—barely—and turned back toward the elevator as Pidge came trotting back toward him, a put-out look on their face. Matt hesitated for a fraction of a second before joining the rest of them in the elevator. He put his back to the wall and stared at the panel over the doors that displayed their current floor, his jaw sliding side-to-side the way it did when he was working himself up to say something.

“Hey, Keith, mind if I ride along on this one?”

Keith, Shiro, and Pidge all turned as one to stare at the sides of Matt’s head, which caused a pink tinge to creep up into his cheeks. He tapped one finger against the helmet held against his hip, but kept his eyes fixed on the far wall.

“Uh… sure,” said Keith eventually, shrugging. “You, uh, you wanna fly?”

Matt shook his head. “Been out of the heat too long for that, I think. Better to wait until there aren’t lives riding on the outcome. I just figure it’s time to get back in the game, you know? Two weeks on the bench is more enough.”

“Sure,” said Keith. He shot Shiro a wary look, as though searching for approval. Shiro gave a tiny shrug, and then the elevator arrived at the prep room. Keith crossed at once to the locker where his armor hung, but he glanced over his shoulder at Matt and nodded. “I’ll be right down, I guess?”

But Matt had already disappeared down the Red Lion’s access chute.

* * *

Matt entered the Red Lion with some trepidation. He hadn’t been down to see her since yielding his spot to Keith, and part of him was convinced she was going to be bitter about that. He’d told himself he had good reason—the hangars were located in the outlying towers, which had been hard to reach when the pain was at its worst; he needed to focus on his recovery before he went lazing around with Red; she needed to bond with Keith, and Matt’s presence could only hinder that.

In reality, he’d just been scared. Scared that he’d been wrong to believe there could be two red paladins at once. Scared that he’d lost his connection with his lion altogether.

He was worried for nothing. As soon as his boots hit the deck, Red rumbled a greeting as fiercely possessive as the one he’d heard when she first accepted him. It shivered up his legs and settled in his chest, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit he had tears in his eyes as he pressed a hand against the ceiling.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “Didn’t mean to make you worry.”

Her voice turned reproachful for a moment—and only a moment. Red, like her paladins, lived in the moment. She could hold a grudge like no other, but once she’d made up her mind to forgive you, she didn’t look back. Matt was here now. That was what really mattered.

Keith arrived just a few moments later, and Red rumbled another greeting to him, one that rattled Matt’s ribs and won a smile from Keith. Matt met Keith’s eyes, and for once he didn’t have to remind himself not to flinch.

It was getting easier; it really was. The first few days had been the worst. Keith’s appearance, his mannerisms—even the nearly indistinguishable snarl of the Galran language lurking behind the castle’s translation—had a way of tugging Matt back towards things he’d rather forget. Sometimes it was just a drip of ice down his back, or a sick feeling in his gut; sometimes it was fully realized flashbacks that left him hyperventilating on the floor as he tried desperately to remind himself that he wasn’t a prisoner any longer. Even today as they sparred, Matt had carried a nameless tension.

It wasn’t Keith’s fault, and Matt was getting better, but here with Red’s voice in his mind and an intangible bond linking all three of them together, he didn’t have to work to disentangle _Keith_ from the faces of strangers from his past.

Keith took a seat at the controls, and Matt stood behind him, grabbing onto an overhead handle as Red loped toward the hangar doors. It was strange to stand inside a moving lion, and Matt didn’t have enough experience to make it entirely comfortable. He was mindful of his knee—holding strong so far, the brace taking the brunt of the G-forces as Keith joined the others in front of the castle-ship.

“The distress beacon indicates heavy Galra presence on the surface, but only a small fleet in orbit,” Allura said to them. Matt reached his mind out through his helmet’s neural circuitry to access the original distress beacon, which obediently projected itself across the right half of his visor.

The planet Merkul, he saw, had been a major trader of metal ores before the Galra invaded. Industrial facilities covered the surface, but nearly the entire population lived on the two largest moons. The third moon was uninhabited, and the fourth housed the long-range transmitter through which the beacon had been routed.

Matt frowned. “Are we sure this isn’t a trap? The Galra must have control of that transmitter.”

“I know,” said Allura. “That’s why we need to keep an eye out for tricks. When we arrive, split up and clear out the fleet as fast as you can. Shiro, Lance, and Hunk, as soon as the skies are clear, head down to Merkul’s surface. That’s where the mines are, so that’s where most of the forces are concentrated.”

“Sounds easy,” said Lance, cocky enough that Matt almost thought he’d imagined the awkwardness on the training deck earlier. “Save the day, woo some locals.” He grunted as he stretched his arms over his head. “Just my style.”

“Lance,” Shiro said, sighing.

Allura ignored Lance entirely and continued. “The first two moons appear to only have a small number of sentries to keep the Merka in line. Pidge, there should be a central command beacon on each moon. Find them, and shut them down.”

“You got it.”

“Keith, your target is the fourth moon. We don’t want the enemy calling for reinforcement. Matt’s with you, correct?”

Keith glanced over his shoulder. “Yep.”

“Good. If you think the two of you can get in without too much trouble, try to disable the transmitter--but don't destroy it entirely. The Merka may need it after we’re done here. Any questions?”

A chorus of nos sounded over the comms. Allura nodded and, a moment later, opened a wormhole large enough to encompass the castle-ship. Keith shot ahead of the others, entering the wormhole first. Red rumbled in approval, and Matt couldn’t resist a smile.

“A little eager, are we?” he asked, mentally silencing his comms. He was getting good at that, after practicing with his brace for the last few days.

Keith didn’t take his eyes off the viewscreen, but his lips quirked into a smile. “Just ready to kick some ass,” he said lightly.

Matt chuckled, but by then the far end of the wormhole was in sight. They emerged, the sudden deceleration—maybe just a trick of the eyes—making Matt sway and reach his free hand up toward another handhold. The Black and Yellow Lions appeared just behind Red, and the three of them dove into the fray as the rest of the team arrived.

Battle was always a blur—more so when Matt wasn’t at the wheel. He had more time to notice the wider fight, the close calls involving the others that he could just barely make out as they flashed in and out of sight. It was easier than he would have thought to keep his feet. Granted, he’d managed all right in that first mad flight from Earth, and he’d carried Keith and Allura in his lion when they went to take on Haggar’s superweapon over Berlou.

Still, he couldn’t help but marvel at how smooth the ride was. It might have been stabilizers built into the lion—he’d seen them during maintenance, but hadn’t had time to really study them—or the fact that Keith flew with just as much skill as Shiro, as though he’d been born flying. Maybe it was Red herself, or some artifact of their bond that let Matt roll with the motion of flight.

A gunship took aim at them while Keith was dealing with a formation of smaller fighters, but before Matt could shout a warning Red roared. Keith didn’t even hesitate, just pulled them hard to the side, rolling beneath the gunship’s lasers and opening fire on its underbelly.

As they cleared the resulting explosion, Keith shot Matt a strange look, too fleeting to make sense of.

Then they were back in the thick of it, and Matt didn’t have time to wonder what Keith was thinking. Pidge appeared in the distance with a flash of lightning, Hunk tossed a gunship into a knot of fighters on Shiro’s tail, and Lance kept up a steady stream of commentary that Matt didn’t really hear.

The orbital troops were cleared out in a matter of minutes, and the paladins broke off into their separate groups. Matt spared a momentary thought for the others—for Shiro and Lance and Hunk, heading down to the real battle on the ground. For Pidge, off to the first two moons by themself. It seemed on the surface to be the least dangerous part of this battle, but Matt wouldn’t trust the Galra to make anything easy.

Keith wheeled the Red Lion around, snapping Matt out of his thoughts, and they sped toward the fourth moon. It was a small spheroid, unbalanced by the large structure on one side that housed the long-range transmitter.

Red reached the moon with little trouble aside from a few satellites that made the comms screech with interference. They lost contact with the others for a moment before the connection cleared, and Matt traded wary looks with Keith, who scowled and eased them closer to the moon base.

They set down outside the front doors, but neither of them moved.

“How’s it going?” Allura asked.

Keith glanced around, his hands lingering on the Red Lion’s controls.

“Fine,” Matt said. “Strangely so.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no one up here,” Matt said. “At all.”

Allura was silent for a long moment. “Perhaps we were wrong. That may not be a Galra transmitter at all. Perhaps they thought it disabled, and the Merka repaired it in secret.”

Matt glanced at Keith, who seemed troubled. “Maybe...”

With a deep breath, Keith released the controls and sealed his helmet. “I’m going to check it out.”

“All right,” said Allura. “Be careful. Call if you find trouble.”

Keith grunted, cut the connection, and headed for the ramp. Matt hesitated a moment longer, scanning the deserted base visible through the viewscreen. Matt was no expert, but it _looked_ Galra. He couldn’t stop thinking that something here was wrong, but he turned and followed Keith toward the exit, sealing his own helmet.

Blinding white light like lightning filled the cockpit for a fraction of a second, and a shiver passed through the Red Lion, stopping her paladins in their tracks. Something was coming. A shadow. Two shadows, moving fast. The image Red offered them was indistinct, but it tasted like danger.

Keith was back in the pilot seat before Matt had finished sorting through Red’s impressionistic message.

They rose from the surface just in time to avoid a violet-tinged laser as big around as Red’s leg. It struck the ground where they’d been standing, carving out a crater several times larger than the lion and leaving behind a black, tar-like stain.

“What the hell?” Matt staggered as Keith shot forward. He reached up for handholds, but still only narrowly avoided a fall as Keith spun them around, back toward their attacker.

Attack _ers_.

“Robeasts,” Keith whispered. “ _Vrekt_.”

Two creatures hovered between them and the moon’s surface, twin beasts that seemed to be modeled after the Voltron Lions. They were half Red’s size, but each bore enough armor and weaponry to make even Keith hesitate. The one on the left was painted a deep red-brown like the color of dried blood, a Galran sigil carved into its forehead. The other was entirely black, a color so deep it faded into the backdrop of stars, only visible for the violet Quintessence-glow beneath its skin.

Matt didn’t recognize them, which was as worrisome as it was comforting. The Galra hadn’t twisted another one of Matt’s friends to make these weapons.

But they’d taken someone else, and that meant there was no limit to the number of these creatures that could be out there, suffering, waiting to be sent against the paladins of Voltron.

“Allura?” Matt said. “We might have a problem.”

The robeast lions shot forward too quickly for Matt to track, charging toward Red. Keith opened fire, but they flickered, disappearing from sight for a fraction of a second and reappearing behind Red.

They let loose with twin laser blasts that rocked the cockpit, nearly knocking Matt of his feet.

“Allura?” he called again, voice pitching higher with fear. “Allura, are you there?”

Static was the only response he got, and he swore, bracing himself against Keith’s seat as they took off, the robeasts on their tail. The red robeast appeared suddenly ahead of them, and Keith barely pulled up in time to avoid a jet of white-hot flame.

Keith growled in frustration, the sound raising goosebumps along Matt’s arms.

“Looks like it’s just you and me,” he muttered.

Matt didn’t know if Keith was talking to him or to Red, but he smiled grimly all the same. “Let’s just hope these things aren’t as tough as the last ones they sent after us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those of you who haven't seen, I took part in the Voltron: Legendary December fanwork exchange, so I had two new fics go up this weekend: _How to Fake an Interest in Biomechanical Engineering_ (a Shiro/Matt college AU) and _Some Secrets Don't Need to Be Kept_ (a softer version of the Galra Keith reveal, featuring some dorky Klance-ness.) So basically a whole lot of fluff to break up the angst that happening in this fic. ;) Check them out if you want to!


	4. The Red Paladins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Having built himself a knee brace, Matt decided it was time to get back into the action. He trained with Lance (who quickly excused himself once Keith made an appearance), and when Allura called the paladins to action, Matt rode along with Keith in the Red Lion. Shiro, Lance, and Hunk went down to the surface of the planet Merkul to aid the local miners, while Pidge went to the more heavily populated moons to take out the sentries keeping the Merka subdued. Keith and Matt headed to the smallest moon to take out a communication relay, but were intercepted by a pair of robeasts, who disrupted transmissions, cutting the Red Lion off from the rest of the team.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #862  
>  Dated two years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> There was an accident with the Ziva today. One technician was killed, four more injured. Two sentries were destroyed. Security officer Krin was able to tranquilize the Ziva before they escaped the lab, but it has been determined that they are too dangerous to keep on Vel-17.
> 
> They will be removed from CORE and enrolled in Project Robeast at the direction of Lady Haggar.

* * *

“Vrekt.”

A laser skimmed over Red’s back, so close Keith’s fur stood on end.

“ _Vrekt_.”

He pulled back hard on the controls, wincing as Matt, who stood behind him, yelped and slammed into the pilot seat, jostling Keith. The twin robeasts they were fighting flickered and vanished from the edges of the viewscreen, then reappeared an instant later squarely in the Red Lion’s path.

“Vrekt this all to Vkullor’s eggsack,” Keith grunted, bracing both feet against the floor as the robeasts opened fire. They were too close now for Keith to avoid the attack, and Red shuddered as the lasers—each big enough to suit a warship, never mind a pair of robeasts half the size of a Voltron Lion—buffeted her shields. Shrill alarms clawed at his ears, which twitched, rubbing uncomfortably against the inside of his helmet.

They leveled out, and Matt straightened, muttering an apology as he dragged himself off Keith’s shoulders.

“Well this isn’t great,” said Matt, as though this were some kind of training exercise and not a fight for their lives in the middle of Galra-controlled space with no way to hail their teammates and request backup.

“You _think_?”

A flicker of motion drew Keith’s eye to the shadow of Merkul’s fourth moon. The comm relay they were supposed to be disabling was on the other side of the moon, but so far the robeasts—one red, one black, both designed to look something like the Lions—had him pinned in where he couldn’t get a clear shot at his target. They stayed between him and everything else of note in the area—the other three moons, the planet itself, even the castle-ship, which hovered a quarter of a rotation away beyond the fourth moon’s orbit.

Behind him was open space. No cover, no help.

Keith veered aside as the Black Robeast opened fire with a cluster of smaller lasers mounted on its shoulders, then swerved the other direction when the Red Robeast appeared in front of him, charging its tail-laser.

Grunting, Matt staggered—but this time he managed to stay on his feet with the help of the overhead handles. Keith spared him only a moment’s thought as he spun underneath the violet lasers— _violet_. It was the color of synthetic Quintessence, the color of most Galra weapons. But not weapons like these. The amount of pure Quintessence it would take to create a laser of that size, undiluted, was staggering.

Keith didn’t want to think about the kind of damage that much power could do once his shields gave out.

“They’re too fast,” Matt said. “There’s no way we can escape them.”

Keith grunted, looping around so he was headed once more toward the castle-ship. He waited, thumb twitching as it hovered over the trigger—and unleashed the instant the Red Robeast appeared in his path.

He landed a glancing blow as the creature dodged aside. The Black Robeast was there in an instant, charging in from the side before Keith could take advantage of the opening he’d created. The shields buzzed again, more lights flashing at the edge of his awareness.

Matt was right; escape wasn’t an option. Not as things stood now. They had to fight. Somehow. Except that these things seemed almost to be able to anticipate his moves, and were way too fast to hunt down. Keith had barely managed to hit them yet, and his few successes had left no visible mark on the enemy.

He swore under his breath as the robeasts closed in again, one on either side of him. He dropped beneath their lasers, hoping they would hit each other—but of course they weren’t that careless. The Black Robeast’s laser took a chunk out of the surface of the third, uninhabited, moon; the other burned itself away in open space as Keith twisted onto his back and unleashed a wall of fire.

He maybe managed to singe the Black Robeast’s paw as it zipped away.

Red rumbled a warning, wordless and strained. She, like Keith, couldn’t keep this up forever. Sooner or later, one of the robeasts was going to break through their shield, and then they were as good as dead. He could sense her diverting power to the shields, trying to shore up the damage that had already been done, but as long as they were flying all-out like this, going as fast as Keith could handle, taking turns sharper than any mundane ship would have been able to handle, she couldn’t do much in the way of self-repair.

_We need to change the game._

Grimacing as Matt called out a warning—as if Keith wasn’t keenly aware of the monsters trying to catch him between them—Keith whirled around and fired both of Red’s lasers at the third moon.

Matt was silent for a fraction of a second while Keith turned and took off, unwilling to give the robeasts a clean shot at him. “What was _that_?”

“I’m trying something,” Keith said shortly. Both robeasts appeared in front of him and he charged them, eyes narrowed as he waited for the moment they flickered away to some other vantage point.

The instant they disappeared he spun and fired another volley at the third moon.

Matt made a vague, confused noise, but before he could ask what it was Keith was trying, a laser clipped Red’s tail, making the floor buck beneath them. Matt cried out, and Keith’s knee slammed into the underside of the console. More alarms joined their friends in crying out a redundant warning, and Red whined inside his head.

He pressed his lips together, focusing on avoiding the rest of the lasers and not on how, if Red was yelling at him directly, the shields had to be close to shredded.

The third moon bore several new craters, large and ugly, but he wasn’t doing nearly enough damage. Voltron could have taken it out, but the lions just weren’t that powerful.

“Look, Keith, I don’t know what you’re planning, but I don’t think it’s working.”

“Do you have a _better_ idea?”

Matt paused, humming in a way that reminded Keith of Red’s irritated growl. “Rewind time and bring some backup with us?”

Rolling his eyes, Keith tucked into a tight roll and headed back the way he’d come. “Great. You work on that, I’m gonna keep shooting at that moon because we’re screwed anyway if we don’t do _something._ ”

Matt offered no more argument, and Keith watched the motion of the robeasts, waiting for another opening. It was a shit plan, and he knew it, but he wasn’t going to sit here like a useless lump while he waited to be mauled to death by a couple of knock-off lions.

If he was going down, he was going down fighting.

He fired again at each of the robeasts, then turned toward the moon, roaring, and let loose.

The laser that answered his silent plea was noticeably larger than Red’s usual lasers, and Matt swore softly but fervently as Keith blinked away spots and urged Red into a zig-zag to throw off the robeasts’ aim.

It didn’t hit him that something significant had happened until the third moon shattered into a field of lion-sized chunks.

“Well,” Matt said, stunned. “I guess that’s one solution.”

Keith stilled for just an instant, distantly aware of Red’s self-satisfied rumble, as he took in the carnage. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, he’d just done—but he’d take it. As the robeasts behind him peppered him with lasers, he took off toward the shattered moon, twisting aside from each wave of attacks until he reached the relative safety of the debris field.

* * *

The first thing Pidge did was scan Merkul’s first two moons for the control signal. They’d encountered enough sentries by now that they’d programmed Green to automatically distinguish between them and organic beings, and it took only a little more tweaking to merge that scan with the comms’ frequency scanner. In moments, they’d identified two origin points, one on each moon, sending out an awful lot of signals to an awful lot of sentries.

They headed for the first moon, if only because it was first, and in the absence of any more compelling reason they might as well go in number order.

The moon was really kind of interesting, now that they saw it up close. Green detected an atmosphere around the moon that had to be artificial—it was fairly small compared to the other moons they’d seen since leaving Earth, and they doubted it had a strong enough gravitational pull to hold onto any significant sort of atmosphere. Most of the moon’s surface was taken up with a single massive city, which had three or four points where the buildings grew more concentrated, as if several individual cities had merged into one at some point.

A massive city, yes, but it looked bigger because the moon was so small. Stretched flat, it might have been the size of New Mexico—maybe. It took Pidge no time at all to engage Green’s cloaking device and head to the source of the command signal, a big, sprawling complex that would have covered several city blocks back in Carlsbad. They set down on the roof and checked the BLIP-tech display.

Sentries patrolled the area in pairs, roughly one pair to every block. Pidge didn’t want to think about how many sentries that made up across the whole surface of the moon. More immediately worrying were the two dozen Galra soldiers inside the command station.

“I’m not sure I agree with Allura’s definition of _just a few sentries_ ,” Pidge muttered to Rover, who chirped and kept pace with Pidge as they headed for the ramp. They had a little less than thirty minutes to be in and out, though they sincerely hoped it didn’t take them that long.

Summoning their bayard, Pidge headed for the roof access door and gestured for Rover to unlock it. Thank god for Keith’s wrist-computer; with the data Pidge had found on it, they’d been able to update Rover’s security protocols. The little drone took a moment to think, comparing his new database of access codes to the lock on the door. Once he identified the protocols they were using here, he flashed a soft blue confirmation light and relayed the codes to the door.

The lock disengaged with a _clunk_ , and Pidge darted inside the building.

Two guards were waiting at the bottom of the stairs, obviously confused by the stranger entering through the roof. Rather than alert the rest of the base to the intruder, though, they just raised their guns and took aim.

Grinning, Pidge darted forward, bayard sparking, and zapped both guards before they had time to do anything more than look vaguely intimidating. Pidge stashed the guards in a nearby closet, smashed their comms, and welded the door shut with the flat of their bayard’s blade.

Once done, they checked the scanners and set off toward the beacon. “Come on, Rover,” they whispered. “It’s this way.”

They met no more guards as they navigated the upper floor; most of them were concentrated down on street level, while all the interesting tech bits were up here away from the commoners. (As if any competent saboteur would walk through the front door.) Pidge almost had to laugh.

Still, the command beacon wasn’t entirely undefended. Two more Galra stood guard outside the big, armored door, and the scanners showed three more in the room beyond.

Pidge fired their bayard as soon as they rounded the corner, lassoing the guard on the left, and yanked her forward just as the second guard opened fire. The laser buried itself in the first guard’s back, and Pidge grimaced as they let her body drop to the floor. It always felt gross to make the Galra kill each other—even more so because by and large the Galra didn’t seem to care.

But there was no time for that now. Pidge fired their bayard again, catching the guard’s gun in a noose. He held on as Pidge yanked back, but doing so pulled him off balance. The armored door opened, revealing two of the three Galra inside, and Pidge quickly finished off the floundering guard, activating their shield to catch the first burst of laserfire from the newcomers.

Rover, unnoticed, slipped behind the two Galra and zapped one of them in the back of the neck. He convulsed once, screaming, then dropped to the floor, his companion turning toward him in alarm. Pidge finished this one off, too, then sprinted inside just in time to see the last Galra slap her hand down on a big red button.

An alarm started to blare, and Pidge made a face as they tased the Galra and tossed her out in the corridor with the other guards.

“Rover, seal the door,” they called as they headed for the computer mainframe along the back wall of the room. Sure, they could have tried hacking the beacon, but with the base now on high alert and that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard screech of the alarm—not to mention the strobe light flashing over the displays—they were definitely leaning toward the quick-and-brutal approach.

Anything permanent, right?

Eye twitching as the alarm continued to blare, Pidge got to work.

* * *

There was very little to see on the surface of Merkul. A few clusters of what looked like barracks. Some guard towers, and a handful of small airfields filled with Galra transports and escort ships. A whole lot of open countryside, which ranged from bare stone to vast prairies to mountains taller and more rugged than any Shiro had seen before.

“Split up,” he said to Lance and Hunk. “Scan the planet and destroy any military structures you see, weapons and ships especially. If you’re not sure what it is, leave it for now. We don’t want to hurt any of the miners.”

“Right.” Lance took off toward the shoreline in the distance, while Hunk headed nearly the opposite direction, toward the rocky lowlands. That left the northern mountains for Shiro, and he took his time, scanning the uneven slopes for hidden defenses and camouflaged airfields. He picked them off as he spotted them, riding out the disorganized counterattack. They didn’t manage to get many fighters in the air, though, and their ground-based lasers could only do so much against the Black Lion.

It took fifteen minutes for the three lions to cover the largest landmass, and once the scans were complete they uploaded the information to the Castle of Lions, where Coran looked it over.

“There in the south,” he said after a moment. “There’s a lot of activity in those hills. I’d bet good money that’s where the Galra headquarters are.”

Shiro nodded and headed to the spot Coran had marked. “You heard him, guys. Let’s go.” He let Black take over the navigation as he checked the scans. “It looks like they’ve been mining this region for a long time,” he said. “Look at how deep some of those tunnels are. There’s no way that’s safe.”

“It is just like my Balmera,” Shay said, her voice soft and angry. “Zarkon exploits all he sees. He will bleed this land dry, and then he will make her people kill themselves to extract the very marrow of their world.”

“Not this time,” Hunk said. His voice was nearly as low as Shay's, but trembling with the kind of anger Shiro had rarely heard from him. “Not as long as we’re here. We’re going to stop this, and we’re going to free the Merka just like we freed your people.”

Shay breathed out, smiling. “Yes. I wish you luck, paladins. Be safe.”

Shiro nodded his thanks as he angled his lion down toward the smoldering ruins of an airfield and guard towers near the map marker. “Don’t worry, Shay. We’ll be fine.”

“We’re professionals after all,” Lance said, just a hint of bitterness in his voice. Seeming to realize this, he laughed and flashed a thumbs-up at the camera. “We’ll bring Hunk back safe and sound, don’t you worry.”

“L-Lance!” Hunk stammered, going red.

Shiro chuckled, but by then they were on the ground. The mine entrance lay just ahead, guarded by a handful of nervous-looking Galra soldiers. “All right. We’re going to have to go on foot from here. Everyone ready?”

Lance and Hunk voiced their agreement, though neither of them sounded particularly confident in their affirmation. Shiro didn’t blame them. He still hadn’t adjusted to the thought of the universe picking a bunch of teens and twenty-somethings as its elite freedom-fighting force. It was times like these, heading underground to face an army with just two guns and an alien prosthetic, that he wondered whether he’d somehow missed the joke.

But the situation here was real, and the Merka miners needed Voltron’s help. Shiro wasn’t going to back out, and he wasn’t going to let Lance and Hunk collapse under the weight of their task. He was the leader. He had to be strong for them.

So with one deep breath, he headed for the ramp. Black’s shield materialized behind him, sizzling as the Galra ahead opened fire. Shiro activated the shield in his paladin armor without breaking stride, refusing to flinch in the face of this pathetic force. He’d faced worse, and they didn’t deserve the satisfaction of seeing him falter.

The Galra were so focused on Shiro—and so busy quaking in their armor at the sight of their Champion with his glowing hand marching toward them—that they didn’t see Lance and Hunk closing in from the sides until it was too late.

Lance and Hunk opened fire before Shiro even reached the mine entrance. In seconds, the area was silent once more.

Shiro glanced around in case the Galra had prepared an ambush, but he found nothing. Nodding to Hunk and Lance, he headed for the entrance, a dark hole in the slope shoddily reinforced with steel beams. Low-grade crystal lamps illuminated the tunnel beyond, which was as deserted as the surface.

“Looks like the Galra are mostly concentrated in these first few levels,” Coran informed them over the comms. “The Merka are in the deepest levels with a few guards—probably still hard at work under the empire’s watchful eye.”

“Good,” Shiro said. “Keeps them out of the way of the fighting.”

“Any chance we could just… I dunno. Skip the army and go straight for the prisoners?” Lance asked hopefully.

Shiro shook his head. “If we don’t take care of the troops here, that doesn’t fix anything. We take out the army first, then head for the lower levels.”

Spreading his hands wide, Lance sighed. “Well, it was worth a try. So what’s the plan?”

“Take them by surprise,” Shiro said. “There should be some kind of explosives here, considering how deep the mine goes. We can use those.”

Lance grimaced, but nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Peachy.”

Shiro frowned, watching conflicting emotions play across Lance’s face—guilt and disgust foremost among them. Shiro felt an unexpected pang of sympathy. Now wasn’t the time or place for a discussion of the ethics of war, but Shiro made a note to talk to Lance later. Shiro had struggled with that question not so long ago, and if he could make it any easier on the younger paladins, he would gladly do so.

Before that, though, they had a planet to save.

“Moon one’s good to go,” Pidge said suddenly, their chipper voice a stark contrast to Shiro’s thoughts. “I’m heading on to the next one.”

“Sounds good,” Shiro said. Then, as an afterthought, he added, “They’re probably aware of us by now. Be careful moving forward.”

“Right.”

“Matt, Keith? How’s it coming?” Shiro had started toward the elevator that led deeper into the mine, but his steps slowed as seconds ticked by with no answer. “Keith? Matt?”

Lance stepped up beside Shiro, a troubled look on his face. A glance behind them showed Hunk, equally worried, shifting from foot to foot as he glanced at the dim tunnel around them.

Frowning, Shiro switched over to a private line to Allura—he didn’t want to worry Pidge prematurely if he could help it. “Allura, have you heard anything from Matt or Keith?”

“Not since they arrived on the fourth moon,” she said, voice strung taut. “There may be some interference from the communications relay.”

It was a weak suggestion, but Shiro appreciated the effort. He glanced again at his companions and forced a more optimistic tone than he felt the situation warranted. “Right. We’re going to keep going down here. Let us know when that signal clears up.”

The words didn’t do much to ease Lance or Hunk’s tension, but Shiro gestured them onward. Matt and Keith were both perfectly capable fighters, and they had their lion. They were fine.

Anyway, Shiro had a job to do. It wouldn’t be fair to the Merka to abandon them to go check on his friends, however much he wanted to. He would just have to finish up here as quickly as he could—and hope that by then Allura had some good news.

* * *

“We’re going over there,” Allura said, trying not to sound too eager about the prospect.

Coran turned toward her, arching his eyebrow. “Princess?”

Schooling her expression, Allura placed both hands on the control pedestals and began to turn the castle-ship toward the fourth moon. “Something must have happened, Coran, and I’m not going to sit here while my paladins are in trouble.”

She waited for him to argue. She could name several alternatives he might suggest, and she was ready with a counterargument for each. Pidge was closer, faster, and better equipped for a fight—but they had their own mission that had to take priority. Coran could go check things out in a shuttle—but that was too risky, the shuttles too flimsy to send into danger. They could check the castle’s comms for a malfunction before rushing into danger—but the comms worked perfectly well with the rest of the team.

She wondered if Coran and Shay could see how ignoble her motivation really was. There was nothing to do up here in the castle-ship. No Galra to fight out here in orbit, nothing that needed monitoring. Shiro had the command well in hand for his crew on the ground, and Pidge would only get irritated if Allura tried to micromanage their part of this mission.

Allura knew her role as commander was an important one. It was what she’d trained for, it was what she’d watched her father do in countless battles during her adolescence, to great effect. But that was when Voltron had had allies and support fighters who needed coordinating. The black paladin led Voltron, while King Alfor and Lieutenant Commander Falna, Head of the Voltron Guard, directed the rest of their troops. That was how it worked.

But no longer. Allura had no place on Team Voltron and no one else to command.

It was acutely frustrating, standing by like this with nothing to do. Battles in deep space, where she could monitor troops and provide support, were one thing. This was different. She regretted staying here instead of accompanying Shiro and the others to the planet’s surface—but she’d promised herself she would fill her intended role aboard the castle-ship from now on.

But Matt and Keith were in danger. She could sense it in the silence over their comm frequency, in the way the scanners still showed the Red Lion hovering just above the surface of the moon. It was as if the signal had frozen, and that made Allura nervous.

“Do you truly think something has happened to them?” Shay asked. She stood near Coran’s station, carefully out of the way, as she had for every mission since she joined them on the castle-ship. It was obvious to both Allura and Coran that she found the battles difficult to face, but still she remained, resolute and watchful, her hands clasped over her mouth in breathless anticipation until the paladins emerged victorious and returned home.

Until today, it had been Matt who distracted her during the worst moments with stories of the paladins' training, their life on Earth, and the people they had aided in their travels.

“It’s probably nothing,” Allura said in the most reassuring voice she could manage. She had the ship properly aligned now and began to urge them forward. Shay turned toward her, and Allura offered a smile. “Those two can handle just about anything Zarkon might throw at them. But it can’t hurt to see what’s the matter.”

Allura doubted she’d convinced either of her companions—Shay of the Red Lion’s safety, Coran of the necessity of her plan.

She kept on anyway, and the castle-ship picked up speed. They’d been stationed outside the four moons’ orbit, where they could keep an eye on all the paladins and still be in a position to intercept any reinforcements that might arrive. As they approached the path of the fourth moon’s orbit—still several minutes out from the Red Lion’s signal—the castle shuddered. For just an instant, the bridge went dark.

Power returned almost instantly, but Allura lifted her hands away from the controls anyway. “What was _that_?”

Coran’s hands flew across his keyboard. “I’m not sure, Princess. Some sort of energy wave, maybe? It doesn’t seem to have caused any permanent damage to our systems, but—Hm.”

“Hm?” Shay echoed. She glanced at Allura, her luminous eyes dimming nervously. “I do not like the sound of that.”

Cringing, Coran looked up at Allura, then turned a reassuring smile on Shay. “Small breach in one of the towers,” he said. “Probably a bit of space junk. Happens all the time! Not to worry, the pressure doors have already sealed off the area. We’ll be able to repair it just as soon as we clear Merkul and land the castle-ship.”

“If you are certain...”

“As certain as flaming rocks in a thunderstorm,” Coran said confidently.

Cautiously, Allura put her hands back on the controls. They’d drifted somewhat off course during the distraction, and she corrected quickly, urging the castle closer to the fourth moon. Lasers flashed in the distance, somewhere beyond the moon, and a swirl of fire that suggested the Red Lion.

Allura locked eyes with Coran, who nodded, fully sober now. “Checking the scanners,” he said, fingers flicking in a practiced dance.

Were there more fighters hidden on the moon, Allura wondered? Surely the Red Lion would have dealt with something as simple as that by now. She frowned, watching the screens as she waited for Coran to pull up more information.

The next laser was many times the size of those that preceded it, and Allura jumped as it struck the third moon, just a little behind the fourth in its orbit. The larger moon withstood the onslaught for a moment, glowing fissures spreading across its surface.

Then it shattered, chunks of rock thrown so far afield a few of them struck the castle-ship’s shields and dissolved.

In the next moment, the bridge went dark once more. The viewscreen faded to blank white, Coran’s displays flickered out. The lights at the back of the room remained on, giving them enough light to see by, but everything else was dead.

This time, the silence stretched far longer.

* * *

Shiro, Hunk, and Lance found explosives in a storeroom at the back of the top level of the mine, after blasting their way through a dozen or so guards. Lance was looking a little ashen by the time Hunk declared them ready for Phase Two, but he kept his mouth shut and silently followed Shiro to the elevator.

“Looks like they’ve jammed it,” Hunk said.

 _Probably to keep the Merka from escaping,_ Shiro thought. He didn’t voice his suspicion; if Lance and Hunk hadn’t already guessed that, then Shiro wasn’t going to give them any more cause for distraction. Any trap the Galra might have set up to spite the rescuers could wait until the army was dealt with.

“Can you get it running again?” Shiro asked Hunk.

Hunk nodded and squatted beside the elevator controls, rummaging around inside the machinery. Within a few moments, he’d found and stripped two wires that, as far as Shiro could tell, were identical to the dozen other wires beside them. But when Hunk touched the wires together, the elevator platform shuddered to life and began its descent.

Smiling, Shiro nodded his appreciation to Hunk, who grinned and climbed to his feet.

The scans put the Galra troops on the third sub-level, but Shiro held the other two back until they’d reached the floor beneath. Then he slung the pack full of explosives over his shoulder and led the other two out into the tunnel. The mine shafts here must have been picked clean years ago, for they were dim and deserted, filled with the musty smell of mold and stale air.

They met no resistance as they followed the BLIP-tech scan to the center of the mine, directly below the concentrated cluster of Galra vital signs. Pressing a finger to his lips, Shiro gestured at the ceiling, and the three of them split up, attaching explosives to the stone in a wide radius.

Shiro was searching for a place to attach his third bomb when the comms crackled to life and Pidge’s voice come over them, slow and wary.

“Uh… guys?”

“Little busy here, Gunderson,” Lance grunted, balancing atop a pile of loose stones as he stretched up toward the ceiling.

Shiro shot him a look. “What is it Pidge?”

Pidge hesitated, then continued in a rush. “Have you heard from anyone else recently?”

“Not in the last few minutes, no. Why?”

“Because I can’t get through to them. Any of them. Matt, Keith, anyone in the castle-ship… They aren’t answering.”

Lance lowered his bomb, shooting a panicked look at Shiro. Farther down the tunnel, Hunk’s footsteps preceded him as he slunk around the corner, pale and wide-eyed. Shiro took a deep breath, well aware that the younger paladins were counting on him to keep his head. It didn’t matter that Pidge’s words brought his worry for Keith and Matt roaring back to life, or that his blood turned to ice at the thought of something powerful enough to silence the Castle of Lions.

He was the black paladin. They needed him to be in control. “Alright,” he said. “Are you done with the second moon?”

“Yeah,” said Pidge slowly. “I was going to ask Matt how him and Keith were doing before I headed down to help you guys.” They paused. “I see laserfire out that way. I’m going to--”

“You’re going to come down here,” Shiro said before Pidge could rush off and get themself killed.

It went over about as well as he expected. “ _What_? No way! My brother’s up there!”

“With Keith and their lion.” Feeling the weight of Lance and Hunk’s gazed on him, Shiro calmly turned his attention to affixing his last bomb to the ceiling. “They aren’t helpless, Pidge.”

“They aren’t _answering_ either.”

Shiro’s eyes fluttered shut for a moment. “Which means one of two things. Either whoever they’re fighting jammed the signal—in which case they’re probably fine and all you going in there would accomplish is cutting you off from us as well.”

“Or they found something up there,” Hunk whispered. “Something that took out Red _and_ the castle.”

Shiro nodded grimly. “That’s also a possibility—and in that case, Pidge, you’re not going to save them on your own. The best thing to do is get down here and help us take care of the army so we can _all_ go save them.”

Shiro waited for the argument. Pidge was as headstrong as Matt and even more fearless, and Shiro didn’t want to have to explain to Matt why he’d let them charge into a battle they couldn’t win without backup. Of course, there was nothing Shiro could do from down here to stop Pidge from disobeying. He just hoped they trusted him enough to do as he said.

After a long moment, Pidge sighed. “Fine,” they said. “But if anything happens to them--”

“It won’t.” _God I hope it won’t._ “Just get down here. Fourth sub-level.” Shiro glanced at Hunk and Lance. “Are all your charges set?”

They each had one more, but in seconds they had all the explosives in place and headed back to the elevator shaft with the detonator. Pidge came on the comms to let the others know they’d landed by the mine entrance and were headed in.

“Brace yourself, Pidge,” Shiro said. “Hunk?”

Hunk nodded, held his breath, and flipped the switch.

Even though Shiro was expecting the blast, it still had enough force to make him stagger, and he reached out to the wall to steady himself as Lance fell against Hunk.

“Jeez,” Pidge grumbled. “Overkill, much?”

“Sorry.” Hunk set Lance back on his feet and shot Shiro a guilty grimace. “Sorry. That stuff packed more of a punch than I was counting on.”

Shiro waved a hand. “Not your fault.” He tapped the side of his helmet, and the BLIP-tech scan reappeared, this time showing considerably fewer life forms on the third sub-level. “Looks like it did what we needed it to do. Pidge, come on down, and we’ll take the lower floors together. Once we have the Merka cleared out, we’ll head up to help the others.”

“Right. At the elevator now. Coming--”

Pidge’s words were drowned out by a shriek from deep within the mineshaft. The sound made the air shiver and Shiro’s skin crawl. Hunk stumbled away from the opening while Lance, ashen-faced, raised his rifle.

“What the _quiznak?_ ”

Shiro opened his mouth, but another shriek emanated from the elevator shaft, this one more like tearing metal than something living. The tracks along which the elevator platform ran quivered and, in one smooth motion, ripped away from the stone wall. They fell into the darkness, followed an instant later by the elevator platform itself.

Shiro’s heart stopped beating. “ _Pidge!_ ”

* * *

Allura’s feet hit the floor with a _clang_ that resounded in her chest like a cannon’s blast. She stood for a moment, frozen by memories ten thousand years old. She hadn’t been down here since before Zarkon revealed his true allegiance.

The sound of Shay’s feet on the ladder above her snapped her out of her reverie and she moved aside, squinting into the dark expanse. The castle’s computer core was cold and dark, more now than ever with the primary cylinder offline. Most of the other cylinders remained active, suffusing the air with a faint, bluish glow. Allura could just barely make out Coran’s silhouette ahead of her, heading for the primary cylinder, which sat directly in line with the ship’s main crystal on the floor above.

“Wow,” Shay breathed, hovering beside Allura. Her eyes gave off a dim glow in the darkness, and Allura silently shifted into a Balmeran form, her vision sharpening as her eyes’ anatomy changed.

The computer core stretched out around them in all directions, silent catacombs that comprised an entire level of the Castle of Lions. Cylinders as big around as a cryopod lined the distant walls and filled the space between like a forest made of metal and glass. Each was filled with its own aurora, data stored as Quintessence in a microscopic crystalline lattice.

Ordinarily the primary cylinder would be the same, but much brighter, regulating the ship’s main computers—including nearly everything on the bridge. It was dark now, eerily so.

Allura shuddered as she made her way toward Coran. The Castle of Lions was very nearly a living thing, and this cylinder was its mind; to see it so devoid of light was unnerving.

“Can you tell what happened?” Allura asked as she approached Coran, who knelt beside the primary cylinder, wearing a Galra form. It, like Allura’s Balmeran shift, granted him better night vision, but Galra hands were more dextrous than Balmeran, allowing him to sort through the crystals and wiring behind the access panel he’d removed.

After a moment, Coran sat back and sighed. “There’s no sign of damage. Crysals are all aligned, no shorts or cut wires. It’s still got power, it’s just… shut down.” He glanced around at the dozens of identical cylinders. “Someone must have gotten in here somehow to shut it off.”

“Is there no way to do so remotely?” Shay asked.

Coran fitted the access panel back into place. “No. Only the computers on the bridge have direct access to this core.”

Allura frowned. “Are you able to restore power?”

“Yes, but… that still leaves the problem of how they managed to get in. And whether they’re in a position to shut it down again.”

“Do it anyway,” Allura said.

Nodding, Coran strode to the control panel. He placed a hand on the screen there and fed the system a bit of his own Quintessence, powering up the display. A few short swipes began the restoration process, and the cylinder before him sprouted feathery, multicolored shoots.

Allura walked a slow circle around the cylinder, watching the process for any hiccups. There was a backup core elsewhere in the castle they could switch over to if needed, but it provided only basic functions, and it would take time—it was kept separate from the main core as another layer of protection against hackers, and Allura would have to go through several authentications before the castle would grant her access.

The three of them waited several minutes as the core resumed its normal function, and there was no sign that whatever had shut it off to begin with might reoccur. After a time, Allura let her shift go and glanced around at the aurora glow of the computer core. The cylinder was nearly finished initializing, and the AI would come back online any time now.

Satisfied, Allura turned and headed for the ladder.

The light behind her changed from the diffuse Quintessential glow of the core to the sharper, bluer, digital cast of a hologram. Allura froze, cold anticipation creeping down her spine.

“Hello, Allura. I’ve missed you.”

Her father’s voice washed over her like an icy wave, raising hairs along her arms. Allura closed her eyes for just an instant, then forced herself to move on. Whatever face it wore, the ship’s AI was not Alfor, any more than it had been Allura’s grandmother back when it still took that form, back when it was still permitted to take form at all outside the computer core.

After a moment of silence, Coran began issuing commands to the AI. His voice was strained, but he kept it level as he ordered the AI to run a scan for potential security breaches or internal malfunctions. She knew he’d been down here several times since they emerged from cryo-sleep. He’d figured out how to deal with the ghosts of their dead planet better than Allura had, so she left him to it and focused on getting back to where she didn’t have to face everything she’d lost.

Halfway to the ladder, her eyes fell on the cylinders lining the outer walls of the room. These were the memory cores, which held the imprint of fallen paladins, royals, and other important members of the ship’s crew.

Allura’s eyes went at once to the last core in one of several distinct lines. It seemed to sense her eyes on it, and the faint glow within grew brighter, lines of light spiraling outward like a vine growing in fast-forward. Allura watched, riveted, only dimly aware of Shay’s presence at her side.

_Mother._

“Allura.”

Allura gave a start and turned toward Coran, who watched her with scarcely-concealed worry. He glanced at Shay, then deliberately lightened his tone.

“I’m going to make sure everything’s all right up above. You two coming?”

“Yeah.” Allura nodded, doing her best to ignore the memory core’s silent call. “Yes. I’ll be up in just a moment.”

Coran’s eyes softened, but he only nodded in understanding and headed for the ladder. She appreciated his sympathy as much as she appreciated the moment of privacy. He was the only one who could truly understand Allura’s grief, and her need for space. He’d been there, with Allura and Alfor, on the day they transferred the last of Lealle’s memories into her memory core. It had been the one time Alfor allowed himself to cry over his wife’s death, and Coran’s somber presence had been the only thing keeping Allura in the room.

Then again, ten thousand years later, it had been Coran who was there with her while the paladins had been out retrieving the Green and Yellow Lions. It had been Coran who stood beside her when the castle’s AI, wearing her father’s face, made its first appearance, and Allura found out her father had destroyed his own memory profile.

It had been Coran who caught her, kept her on her feet, kept her hands on the controls so she didn’t strand her paladins on the wrong side of a wormhole.

Coran had constrained the AI’s corporeal form to the computer core after that, for which Allura was grateful. The universe needed her too much for her to spend time mourning a man ten thousand years dead.

“Princess?” Shay asked, her voice timid.

Startled, Allura wiped her eyes and turned toward Shay with a smile. “I’m sorry,” she said, a little breathless. “I thought you’d already gone.”

“Forgive me.” Shay glanced toward Lealle’s memory core. “Shall I leave you?”

“No, it’s all right. I should go help Coran anyway. There’s still a battle to be fought, after all.” Allura straightened, brushing down the front of her armor, and gave Shay a smile. “It would seem the computers are working just fine. Let’s go.”

Allura had only taken a single step toward the ladder when Shay’s eyes widened. She gasped, and Allura began to turn—only for Shay to grab her by the wrist and yank her backwards.

Something small and nearly invisible brushed past her, slicing a shallow cut along her cheek. It landed several paces away and skidded into the shadows between two cylinders as Allura staggered against Shay, who spun, putting Allura behind her just as the creature leaped again.

“Aaah!”

“Shay!” Allura cried. She pulled out of Shay’s protective hold as Shay doubled over, clasping a hand over her shoulder. Dark, sticky blood oozed between her fingers.

Allura didn’t have time to check on her, for the thing that had injured her had turned its attention to Allura. It was too small and too quick to make out in the half-light of the computer core, but it moved with quick, jerky motions. It leaped at her, and Allura activated her armor’s shield—lighter and slightly smaller than a paladin’s shield, but still large enough to stop the creature in its tracks.

No. Not a creature; a _robot_. Small and multi-legged, it scuttled across the ground toward the primary cylinder.

 _Oh no you don’t,_ Allura thought, diving after it. She caught it in one hand, and it spun, stabbing at her wrist with its spine-like legs. The first blow cracked Allura’s armor. The second drew blood, and Allura yelped. She didn’t release the robot, however, only gripped it tighter and slammed it against the floor again and again until it stopped moving.

Coran dropped down from above, a glowing blue spear in hand.

“What is it? What happened?”

Allura stood, shaking out her injured hand. “Intruder,” she said, gesturing to the remains of the robot. “It was trying to shut down the computers again, so I stopped it.” Coran glanced between Allura and the twisted metal shell on the floor, a question building on his lips, but Allura turned her attention to Shay. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said, managing a smile as she lurched upright, still clutching her shoulder. “This is nothing compared to what the Galra do.”

“Even so.” Allura turned Shay around and peered at the twin punctures on her back. They seemed deep, and they oozed enough blood that Shay’s nonplussed attitude didn’t convince Allura in the slightest. She glanced at Coran. “She may need a cryopod.”

“Really,” Shay said, pulling away. “You needn’t worry so for me.”

Allura frowned, but didn’t press the matter. Shay’s life was not in danger, but Matt and Keith were still out there, and they almost certainly needed aid.

"Very well. Let's go."

* * *

“ _Pidge!_ ”

Shiro’s voice rang over the comms as the elevator platform Pidge had been standing on fell away.

“I’m fine,” Pidge said, voice more than a little shaken. They clutched their bayard like their life depended on it—which, honestly, it kinda did. The bayard’s tether stretched away into the darkness above them, the blade hooked on who knew what. The remains of the elevator track? The stone ceiling of the shaft? A rotten wood cross-beam?

Pidge tried not to think about the odds of their lifeline giving out on them as they surveyed the shaft around them. The elevator platform had housed the only light in the shaft, and that was long since lost to the depths of the mine. Pidge’s headlamp gave only a very narrow view of the rock around them, even with the help of Rover, who cranked his lights up as high as they would go and circled down toward the next floor.

“Anyone wanna tell me what the hell just did that?” Pidge asked, staring at the darkness past their toes. They were going to have to move sooner or later, but they weren’t completely convinced that continuing down toward Shiro and the others was safe.

Shiro blew out a long breath, and Pidge saw the beam of his headlamp an impossible distance below them as he leaned out into the tunnel and looked down.

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “Some kind of Galra booby trap?”

Something stirred in the darkness. A patch of blue flashed through Shiro’s headlamp beam, and a gust of wind buffeted Pidge. Crying out, they curled in on themself, clutching their bayard for all they were worth and praying the hook held.

When the wind passed, the comms exploded with shouts. Laser fire spat out into the elevator shaft two floors below Pidge, neon bright and scattered in a way that spoke of panic.

“Shiro!” they called. “Guys, what’s happening?”

Their only answer was more shouting, followed by a roar that was loud enough for Pidge to hear without the comms. Swearing, Pidge let out the bayard’s tether, dropping swiftly to the yawning darkness that was the third sub-level. Laserfire still occasionally shot out of the next opening down, and they hesitated to put themself in the line of fire, when the others probably wouldn’t see them in time to adjust their aim.

Rover appeared suddenly from the darkness of the third sub-level, chirping an all-clear. He circled Pidge once, then darted back the way he’d come. Pidge stared after him for an instant, then fired their jets to start themself swinging and jumped to solid ground.

They landed running, their bayard retracting as they moved. Ahead, Rover was a faint blue stripe in the darkness, and Pidge followed obediently around two corners into a sea of rubble.

Rover vanished through a hole in the floor.

“Clever,” Pidge muttered, grinning, and trotted after him.

Halfway to the hole in the floor, a hand latched onto Pidge’s ankle. They yelped, firing their bayard at the dust-streaked arm reaching out from beneath the rubble. The blade sliced a clean line in the Galra soldier’s wrist, and the hand flinched back. Pidge yanked their foot free as the Galra shifted, shrugging off bits of rock and dust that had fallen on him. He stood, swaying, blood painting his armor, and Pidge backed away.

At the sound of shifting stone behind them, Pidge turned, and found two more Galra climbing from the rubble. Then, farther away, two more.

“Uh… guys?” Pidge said, readying their bayard. “Slight problem.”

On the other end of the comms, Lance grunted. “Yeah, it’s called an alien guard dog and it’s being a pain in the ass.”

“No, I mean there are still some Galra alive up here.”

One of the Galra still had his gun, and he opened fired at Pidge, who backpedaled, summoning their shield to catch the lasers. Two others crouched near piles of rubble where Pidge could see bloodied, broken limbs sticking out, and rummaged around. Probably looking for more guns. The last two didn’t even bother to look, just screamed and charged Pidge, claws out.

“Pidge,” Shiro called. “Are you going to be okay?”

Pidge slashed at one of the charging Galra, drawing blood, and dodged aside as the other tried to blindside them. They danced back—then something reached out and tripped them.

A sentry, its body crushed but its circuits still working well enough for it to grab Pidge as they passed.

Pidge windmilled, struggling to stay on their feet, but one of the Galra who had hung back took a cheap shot at them, laser catching them in the side. They fell, gasping for breath, and Lance screamed their name.

“I’m fine,” Pidge grunted, lifting their legs to catch one of the unarmed Galra, who had decided to try pouncing on Pidge while they were down. They halted him just far enough away to keep him from gouging their eyes out, then heaved, legs straining, and threw him backward.

Pidge was on their feet in an instant, bayard and shield up. They caught a burst of laser fire, spun, and slashed at the nearest Galra’s gut.

Another Galra opened fire from behind, and Pidge staggered, barely managed to change direction in time to keep a mangled sentry from tripping them once more.

“Okay, um. _Fine_ might have been a little bit generous,” they said. “You guys wanna bring the guard dog up here for a play date?”

“I’m on my way, Pidge,” Shiro said. “Just hold on.”

Three of the Galra were fighting up close now—one of them had found a knife somewhere—and Pidge snagged one with their bayard, slinging him around to take out his friends. This, of course, left them open to the two with guns, and they weren’t fast enough to get their shield up. Two bursts hit them in quick succession. Their back throbbed like it was on fire and their shield arm was starting to go numb, icy except where something hot and wet oozed beneath their bodysuit.

They backed away from the next attack, only to have a sentry they’d missed in the darkness grab them by the heel. They tottered, then fell, landing flat on their back as three Galra bore down on them.

Fear raging through their veins, Pidge summoned their shield, bracing for the worst.

A flash of violet light.

Harsh shadows flickered across Pidge’s vision. The Galra cried out in alarm, then pain.

“Pidge!” Shiro grunted as one of the Galra hammered him with both arms. He slid an inch backward, his boots crunching against the rubble. “Are you okay?”

Letting out a shaky breath, Pidge climbed to their feet and prodded their arm where they’d felt blood. There was a small break in the armor, and the arm twinged with pain at their touch, but they’d live.

“I’m good,” they said, darting forward to help Shiro deal with the Galra soldiers. “Thanks for the save.”

Shiro smiled, cutting down an opponent. “Any time.”

Pidge lingered at Shiro’s side for a few more seconds, but he obviously had the other two unarmed Galra well in hand. Pidge broke away, scanning the room for the two with guns. It was harder now, the light of Shiro’s arm casting the rubble into sharp relief, but the flash of laserfire helped them pinpoint one of the last two attackers. Pidge charged, huddled behind their shield, and buried their bayard in the Galra’s chest.

As he fell they turned, searching for the last survivor. Shiro stood tall and imposing in the center of the room, three forms lying still on the ground around him.

They both spotted the final Galra at the same time and charged. The Galra panicked, firing at Shiro, who was the larger target—and faster, quickly pulling ahead of Pidge (curse their short legs). Scowling, they fired their bayard into the darkness behind the Galra and, as soon as it caught on something, retracted the cord. The tension pulled them across the uneven ground, running reckless over the rubble. They kicked off a larger bit of ceiling and arced around behind the Galra.

They arrived at the same time as Shiro. Pidge disengaged their bayard and landed lightly on their feet, using their momentum to careen toward the Galra from behind. He heard them coming and began to turn, but Pidge dropped low, spinning into a kick that swept his feet out from under him.

Shiro killed him before he hit the ground.

“Nice work,” Shiro said, raising his non-lethal hand for a high-five that Pidge happily answered.

They didn’t have long to celebrate, though; over the comms they heard the grunts and laser blasts that said Lance and Hunk were still dealing with the watchdog (or whatever it really was.)

Shiro sobered quickly and sprinted to the hole in the floor Rover had descended through. The little drone hovered there now, lights dimmed as though in a show of guilt over leading Pidge into danger. Smiling, they patted him on the head as Shiro dropped through the hole to the floor below. His arm was still active, its glow a beacon to mark his position—so Pidge saw the moment he was knocked backward, a glowing purple blur that quickly passed out of sight.

“Shiro!” Hunk called. A second later lasers flashed through the darkness, and something whimpered.

Pidge stepped up to the edge of the hole, squinting in an effort to see what was happening. They tapped out a command on the screen embedded in the wrist of their armor and their visor switched over to an infrared display. They’d only installed it the day before and hadn’t had a chance to debug it yet, so Pidge couldn’t tell what kind of creature it was. Something long and brawny, like an alligator the size of a whale. It twisted and lunged with frightening speed, and Pidge’s friends—smaller, brighter blobs flanking the creature on either side—couldn’t seem to land a hit.

Pidge waited, poised on the edge of the hole, until the creature was directly below them.

Then, they jumped, bayard thrust toward the warm body below. The weapon found flesh—the head, if the eye rolling to white in the dim glow of their bayard was any indication—and let their body weight drive their blade deeper.

The creature thrashed, screaming, and Pidge flailed for a handhold. Their fingers slid over smooth scales, finding no purchase.

Next instant, they were airborne, their bayard winking out of existence.

A pair of arms closed around them, one still bright with residual heat in Pidge’s infrared vision. Shiro grunted and spun, placing his body between Pidge and the alien creature as it roared in fury.

It didn’t get the chance to follow through on its attack. Slowed and confused by its wound, the creature staggered against the wall. Dust rained down on Pidge and Shiro, and Pidge ducked their head, wary of larger chunks that might have been loosened by the earlier explosion.

Hunk’s cannon whined as it charged up, then released a beam as thick around as Pidge’s arm. The creature was too slow to dodge this time, and the laser caught it between the eyes. It screamed one last time, the sound fading to a wet gurgle as it slumped to the ground and did not rise.

Pidge sagged, and Shiro’s arms tightened around their shoulders. Breathing a sigh of relief, he turned to frown at them.

“That was reckless,” he said.

Pidge rolled their eyes. “Comes with the territory.” They pulled out of Shiro’s grip and stood, cracking their neck, but they flashed him a grin. “Nice catch, though.”

Laughing, Shiro glanced at Lance and Hunk, who eyed the dead creature warily. “You two all right?”

“Physically, or emotionally?” Lance asked, his voice full of forced levity.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Shiro said dryly, and when no one argued, he waved them deeper into the tunnel. “Come on. We need to find another way down to the miners.”

* * *

Matt clung to the overhead handholds with both hands, grunting as the G-force of Keith’s spiral threatened to slam him against the wall. He wasn’t sure how long they’d been dodging through the debris field of the shattered moon, but the constant twists and turns had Matt’s knee aching. He was glad for the brace, without which he probably would have long since collapsed, but even with the extra support he doubted he was going to last much longer.

A chunk of rock half the size of Red exploded as one of the robeast’s lasers hit it, and the castoff pelted Red’s shield with a soft patter that might have sounded like rain without the blare of alarms and Keith’s unending stream of curses, both English and Galran.

Matt squeezed his eyes shut as Keith swerved behind another large meteoroid and clipped one that had been hidden behind its bulk. Matt didn’t need the alarms or the red-flashing schematic to know the shields were close to giving out; Red’s pained voice in his head was proof enough of that. She was pushing her limits, giving everything she had to strengthening the shields, and it still wasn’t enough.

It was a fine line they walked, balancing speed with precision. Keith kept them to the thicker regions of the debris field, where there were more bits of moon to absorb the robeasts’ attacks—and to run into. The monsters were still faster and more agile than the Red Lion, but they couldn’t get a clean shot on her while Keith kept to his self-made haven.

The Red Robeast flickered into view ahead of them. Grunting, Keith opened fire at the same moment he wrenched Red around, sending Matt staggering toward the wall. Keith’s shots went wide, but he managed to narrowly slip between two lion-sized rocks before the robeast opened fire.

A growl of frustration slipped between Keith’s teeth, verging on panic. “If I could just take one of them _out_ we’d be _fine_ ,” he seethed. “ _Vrekt_!’

The Black Robeast was waiting for them, too close for Keith to dodge. He opened fire with the new laser—the super-powered one that had shattered the moon. Red’s body groaned with the stress of it, and the robeast dodged easily aside, rolling out of the line of fire and chipping away at Red’s shields.

Keith turned her, but she moved sluggishly, and the schematic burned uniformly red as the shields flickered and groaned.

They ducked behind a meteoroid, and Matt forced himself to keep breathing.

“That laser’s really taking a toll on Red,” he said, scanning the viewscreen for signs of the robeasts. Keith was still moving, tension pulling his shoulders up toward his ears. “I don’t know how much longer she can hold out if you keep using it.”

“I know,” Keith snapped. “But if we don’t take out one of those things, we’re _dead_.”

Matt pressed his lips together, resisting the urge to snap back. It would have been easier if he could see any way out of this mess. But they were no closer to escaping, the comms were still down, and Matt could only guess at the direction of Merkul by the way the robeasts kept herding them away from one edge of the debris field. It was all Keith could do not to let them push him back out the far side into open space.

Another explosion shook the cockpit, and Keith’s muttered curses cut off abruptly.

“Hold on,” he said, tersely, to Matt. “I’m going to try something.”

Matt stared at the back of Keith’s head as they skimmed close over the surface of a particularly large meteoroid and circled back the direction they’d come. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”

“Yeah?” Keith asked. “Tough. We’re not winning this fight without taking a few risks.” He leaned low over the controls, urging Red faster and faster as he headed for the source of the last attack.

Matt widened his stance, ready for the worst. “Yeah, no, risks I’m fine with,” he said. “It’s just that usually I like to know what kind of risk it is before I take it.”

The Black Robeast drifted into view ahead, and Keith leaned harder on the throttle. Red loped across the curve of a meteoroid, then kicked off toward the enemy, roaring a challenge.

“Are you _sure_ you know what you’re doing?” Matt shot a glance at the shield schematics as the robeast opened fire. “Keith, that thing’s going to tear us to _shreds_.”

“Not if I’m fast enough it won’t.”

Another laser hit, and the viewscreen flashed white. Matt screwed his eyes shut against the glare, and in that instant, Red’s voice in his head swelled to fill him, a roar of defiance and a roar of warning.

And just like that, Matt slipped back into the familiar rhythm. The cadence of Red’s engine became his pulse; his awareness expanded to fill the whole lion. The weakening shield crackled over his skin like glass on the verge of shattering. A bone-deep ache settled into him as he glimpsed the full extent of Red’s exhaustion.

When he opened his eyes, it wasn’t the inside of the cockpit he saw, but the debris field around them. The plasma cannon’s weight rested comfortably between his shoulders, and his tail curved to one side as the Black Robeast’s attacks threatened to push him off course.

He wasn’t looking ahead, though, but almost directly behind them—toward the Red Robeast, who was closing in on them, the mouth of every weapon glowing as she prepared to fire. Red knew an attack like that would tear through her shields like wet paper, and she doubted her frail little pilots would survive long after that.

Keith saw the Red Robeast in the same way Matt saw the Black—distantly and distractedly. He was too focused on the threat in front of him to realize the danger behind.

“ _MOVE!_ ”

The word—strangled, panicked, desperate—was meant for Keith, but it was the Red Lion who responded, throwing herself to the side without Keith telling her where to go. The Red Robeast unleashed her barrage, a dozen lethal beams streaking toward the lion as Matt turned her toward a thicket of shattered stone where the lasers wouldn’t be able to reach him.

Shock washed over him, a cold, electric pulse that tightened his grip on the--

“ _What?_ ”

Keith spoke a fraction of a second before Matt found his voice.

For an instant, Matt thought he had somehow taken Keith’s place at the controls—but no. He sat in a padded pilot’s seat in front of a set of controls identical to the ones he knew, but he knew without turning that Keith still sat before his own array, back-to-back with Matt. The viewscreen stretched all around them, a full three-hundred-sixty degrees.

A snarl of emotions rose up within him, shock slowly yielding its iron grip. Confusion and excitement battled for dominance, but fear, guilt, and uncertainty simmered just under the surface.

Matt and Keith recognized the bond simultaneously, and the epiphany silenced their combined emotional riot for just an instant. The notion of _Voltron_ hovered unspoken, but this was something far more immediate, far more _intimate_ than the Voltron bond. As Voltron there was a buffer of anonymity, a softer edge between _me_ and _you_ when three other _yous_ bled into the divide.

Here was only Matt and Keith and the Red Lion, whose quiet satisfaction curled around the bond. Matt got the distinct impression she’d been anticipating this moment from the start.

There was no boundary here, no safe distance. Even as Matt remembered the unity he’d felt fighting Aurel on the Balmera, he remembered, also, the tentative union on Berlou. Keith’s wariness became his own, half-glimpsed accusations pressing at him from just beyond conscious memory.

Through the bond, he was just as aware of Keith’s mind—his thoughts, his emotions, his memories—as his own. More than his own, maybe, if only because of the novelty.

Matt looked up at the screen, and he saw it through Keith’s eyes as well as his own, a double-vision that somehow wasn’t as disorienting as it should have been. He took in the situation outside the lion at a glance. The Black Robeast was still ahead of them, eyes burning Galra yellow, tail half-raised and beginning to glow. Behind them, on Matt’s side of the cockpit, was the Red Robeast. Lasers stretched out from half a dozen barrels, but they seemed frozen, as if time had stopped working along with the rest of the rational world.

_No._

It was Red, and she seemed closer than ever, her voice verging on actual words as she tried to explain what it was that had happened.

A bond. A joining.

Minds meeting, compounding.

Time hadn’t stopped. Red still flew at her same breakneck speed, halfway through a turn that would take her out of the path of the Red Robeast’s lasers. It was just that Matt’s mind, and Keith’s mind, and Red’s mind—if she had a mind in the same sense that her pilots did—were all bent toward the same question. _What happened? What is this?_

A fraction of a second had passed since Matt took joint control of the Red Lion. It only seemed like longer because three minds, together, worked much faster than his mind alone.

Red’s pride kindled in Matt’s chest like fire. Keith sat a little taller in his chair.

The novelty wore off, and they turned their mind back to the battle awaiting them.

The Red Lion flew like a dream. She always had—faster and more agile than anything Matt knew from Earth or Keith from Zarkon’s army. Few ships could compare to a Voltron Lion, and Red was the fastest of her fellows.

Now, though, it seemed as if she’d taken every previous battle at a snail’s pace. The meteoroids that moments ago had seemed too closely packed to safely navigate now might as well have been light-years apart. Red wove through them almost lazily, moving so quickly either of her pilots on his own would have lost control, and easily outstripped the robeasts still attempting to bring her down.

Matt and Keith had heard about Red’s speed, of course. It was legendary, and they’d experienced it for themselves.

Or at least they’d thought they had. As they flew now—Matt catching sight of a laser from the Black Robeast behind them and turning them aside, Keith neatly evading the meteoroids in their path and keeping them close on the Red Robeast’s tail—they realized they’d hardly seen anything.

Red assured them it wasn’t their fault. Only a small handful of species in the universe had the kind of reflexes it would take to push Red to her limits, and none of them had ever crossed paths with the Alteans of old.

It was a problem that had plagued Red since her creation, and she’d had a lot of time to come up with solutions since losing her last paladin. This—dual paladins—had been her favorite theory, and she was quite pleased that she’d found two suitable candidates so quickly after her rescue.

Matt smiled at Red’s self-satisfied rumbling. Keith regarded them both with vague confusion, but he wasn’t complaining about the newfound advantage.

They chased the Red Robeast through the remains of the third moon, hounding her with lasers. Matt turned the tail-laser backward to ward off the Black Robeast, and Keith unleashed a wall of fire to hem in the Red Robeast. She shimmered and corrected her course—but with their minds joined, Matt and Keith could actually track the motion. It wasn’t teleportation, as Matt had been halfway convinced it was, and a well-placed laser from Keith stopped her attempt at escape.

She tried to reverse course, legs flailing as she began to drift, then crashed into a meteoroid. She didn’t rise.

Suddenly finding herself alone and outmatched, the Black Robeast turned tail and fled, but Red was faster by far. They chased her down, lasers alight, and didn’t stop until she stopped moving.

A few moments later they touched down on the surface of the fourth moon near the comm relay, silent stars all around them. For a time Matt just breathed, his awareness settling back into his body, the Red Lion retreating to a quiet, pleased purr in the distance.

Then his emotions caught up with him.

“Holy shit.”

The words escaped him on a rush of air, giddy and incredulous. He fumbled with his restraints until they loosened, then spun around, kneeling on his chair to peer at Keith over the seat-back.

“Holy _shit_ , Keith, we just—How did we _do_ that?” He laughed, lightheaded, and slapped Keith shoulder. “Keith. _Keith_! Oh my god! You were—I was—It was like _Voltron_ , only—” He covered his face with his hands, only distantly aware that they were shaking. “I’ve never flown like that. Have you ever--?”

In the other pilot’s seat, Keith breathed out, shaky and overawed. “I… No. No, I’ve never done anything like that.” He paused, and Matt thought he was going to say something more. He didn’t, though, just took up his controls and opened fire on the relay. “There,” he said, with a laugh that bordered on hysteria. “Mission accomplished. A little late, but--”

“--telling you, Shiro, someone was _fighting_ up here!”

Matt turned back to his controls, grin widening. “Pidge?”

“Matt!” Pidge’s voice wavered, and they swore under their breath. “Where have you _been_? What happened? I thought you were _dead,_ you jerk.”

“Sorry.” Matt couldn’t quite force himself to sound contrite. He was still too busy riding high on the aftereffects of...whatever it was that had just happened. _Holy shit on a stick._ “Sorry, I’m fine. We’re fine.”

“What happened?” Allura demanded. “Something was blocking your signal.”

Matt removed his helmet to run his fingers through sweat-drenched hair. “Robeasts,” he said. “Two of them—no worries, though,” he added quickly, because Pidge was looking wide-eyed and frantic. “We took care of it.”

Silence fell over the rest of the team for two seconds, and Matt couldn’t help the swell of smug satisfaction rising inside him.

It was Lance who spoke first. “How the hell did you beat _two robeasts_ on your own?”

“Well,” Matt turned his head back, meeting Keith’s eyes around the edge of the chair. “That’s kind of a funny story.”


	5. Repercussions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The battle for Merkul took some unexpected turns as Lance dealt with his rising guilt, Pidge and Shiro took on some Galra too stubborn to die, and Allura and Shay ran into a Galra robot trying to take down the castle-ship from the inside. And of course the Red Lion threw the biggest curveball of all when she allowed Matt and Keith to copilot her, unlocking her true potential.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1294  
>  Dated eleven months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> The fifth generation of subjects for CORE has been finalized. Subjects were selected to maximize diversity, prioritizing young, healthy individuals of species whose response to extended deprivation has not yet been characterized. Where possible, three or more subjects of the same species have been selected, though it should be noted that a novel species self-described as _human_ is included in this group. Only three known specimens exist in the empire, and the other two have already been claimed by other Princedoms.
> 
> Subjects were collected from prisons and mundane research facilities across the sector and transported to Vel-17 one at a time. Upon arrival, each individual was subjected to physical isolation without Quintessential deprivation, as specified in the procedures developed for Generation Two. We have thus established baseline vitals for each subject when placed under confinement stress and identified those individuals who will need sedation when transferred to the E-dep chambers.
> 
> Complete descriptions of the new subjects, including species, ID, relevant biological markers, and researcher notes, can be found in the test subject directory on the main servers.

* * *

“You did _what_?” Allura asked, a scandalized note in her voice.

Matt grinned, pulling ahead of her and Shiro and turning to face them. He kept walking backward, trusting Shiro’s nervous looks over Matt’s shoulder to warn him when he was about to run into something.

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Matt said, gesturing broadly with his hands. It had been an hour since he and Keith had returned to the castle—along with Shiro and Pidge—to help Allura check for any other Galra drones that may have breached the hull, but Matt was still buzzing with the high of battle. “It was almost like forming Voltron, just with fewer people. It was _amazing_. We were so fast, Allura, you have no idea. It was like—like we’d been holding her back before. All of her paladins have held her back, so she figured out a way to bring us up to her level.”

“Red did?” Shiro asked. He glanced at Allura. “I didn’t realize they could do that.”

Allura was silent, her lips pursed, and Matt suspected she was fighting the urge to say that the lions _couldn’t_ do it.

“They have had ten thousand years to think,” Matt pointed out, shrugging. “Even if they can’t do much without a paladin, it’s bound to add up eventually. Who knows what else they’ve learned?”

Matt’s words didn’t calm Allura as much as he’d hoped. Instead, her frown deepened. “We should hope they haven’t changed _too_ much,” she said. “Otherwise Coran and I won’t be able to offer you much in the way of guidance.”

“I guess.” Matt glanced over his shoulder as they neared the elevator. “I’m more interested in finding out whether the Black Lion can do the same thing.”

Silence greeted this statement, and Matt turned back around to see that both Shiro and Allura had stopped walking. They stared at Matt with near identical looks: eyes wide and jaws dropped, as if the possibility of copiloting the Black Lion hadn’t even crossed their minds until that moment.

Allura began to grin, slowly at first, then with overt giddiness, her hands flying up to cover her mouth. She glanced furtively at Shiro, who still seemed stunned, and smothered her excitement. “I suppose it’s worth investigating.”

Her words broke the spell cast on Shiro and he chuckled, clearly not fooled by her affected apathy. “I’d be honored to fly with you, Princess Allura.”

Matt flashed them both a smile, then turned with a flourish and skipped into the elevator. “Sweet. Let’s get going.”

“ _Now?_ ” Allura yelped, flushing as Matt and Shiro turned toward her.

“I was about to go meet up with Lance and Hunk,” Shiro said. When the others returned to the castle, Lance and Hunk had stayed in the mines, clearing out the last Galra stragglers and reassuring the Merka, but the castle’s scanners showed dozens more mines across the planet’s surface. None as big as the first, perhaps, but some nearly as well defended. “It's as good a time as any to try.”

Allura stood up a little straighter, regaining her composure. “Of course,” she said. “Let me just notify Coran.”

Matt nodded, waiting for Allura to join them in the elevator before pushing the button for the first floor, where the Black Lion’s hangar was. “Yeah, where is he, anyway?”

“He took Shay to the infirmary to look at her wound,” Allura said. “She insists it’s nothing, but we wanted to be sure.”

“Makes sense,” said Shiro. He fell silent as Allura raised Coran on the comms in her earrings, and Matt bounced on his toes for the remainder of the elevator ride. He’d known—right from the start, he’d known that the Red and Black Lions had chosen two paladins for a reason. And if Shiro and Allura developed a mental bond like the one Matt had shared with Keith, Matt _absolutely_ wanted to be there to see their reactions.

* * *

A hail of lasers cut down the last pair of Galra in this tunnel. The last Galra in the whole mine, as far as Hunk could tell. Lance remained frozen after they fell, his shoulders pulled up so high Hunk was seriously worried he was going to get a crick in his neck, the barrel of his gun belying the shake in his hands.

Hunk released his bayard and stepped up next to Lance, waiting for him to turn his head in acknowledgment before pulling him into a one-armed hug. Lance stiffened for a moment, probably meaning to assure Hunk he was fine, then gave up the effort. His bayard disappeared, and he laid a hand over Hunk’s on his shoulder, offering a tired smile.

“Ready to head back to the surface?” Hunk asked. They’d been clearing out the Merka miners as they made their way through the tunnels, sending them up to the grassy foothills outside. This last batch of Galra had been guarding about thirty miners, who'd headed up ten minutes ago--plenty of time to have joined their friends.

Lance took a deep breath and nodded, pulling away from Hunk without a word.

There were a lot of reasons for Hunk to be worried about Lance—the way he’d thrown himself into each skirmish with an alarming amount of recklessness, the way he came out of those same fights pale and shaking, the way he’d puked in a corner twice since Shiro had left with Pidge.

But the silence was the most upsetting of all. Lance was not supposed to be quiet. He was loud and exuberant and he complained about most things and celebrated even more, and Hunk had never known him to be anything but pumped after a victory. At least… not before these last two weeks. Less than that. Even when Keith had first turned up, Lance had still been outspoken. Angry and suspicious, maybe, but he _did_ talk.

Hunk couldn’t believe he actually wanted Lance to go back to being openly hostile to Keith. It had sucked—for Keith most of all—but Hunk had really thought Lance was going to get over it. He made friends easily, and Hunk had figured once the novelty of a Galra paladin had worn off and Lance let himself see _Keith_ , they’d make peace and everything would be great.

But _this…_

Lance remained silent as they took the elevator back to the surface. Hunk stood on the far side of the platform so he could look at Lance head-on, and he tried to puzzle out what was bothering him. Two years wasn’t a long time to most people, but Hunk and Lance had settled into a comfortable, honest relationship almost instantly. Between Hunk’s inability to lie, Lance’s complete lack of a filter, and the small dorm room they shared, they’d pretty much exhausted their secrets by the end of their first year at the Garrison.

So Hunk didn’t think it was a stretch to say he knew Lance better than anyone else aboard the castle-ship. They were best friends, and they always knew what the other was thinking.

It was harder with Lance not talking, but Hunk had begun to piece things together. He knew Lance was worst when they had to fight. He got quiet right before the battle, he spent the whole fight pulling reckless stunts that weren’t flashy enough to count as showing off or desperate enough to pass off as a necessary risk. And afterward was when he got shaky, when he got sick to his stomach, when he looked the most like a ghost of himself.

It was this last part that sunk its hooks into Hunk and tore, because that was Hunk not too long ago. He didn’t get quiet when he was anxious, not usually. He didn’t get reckless when the reality of war hit him and he realized his friends could die if he didn’t figure out how to deal with his issues.

But he’d been there in the aftermath, blood on his armor and a tremor in his bones that never seemed to go away. This was war, and he was a soldier, and those were real lives they were taking—Galra lives, sure. People who decided it was okay to go to other people’s homes and enslave them and kill them and ruin their planets. But still people. Still living, breathing people with families and aspirations, at least until the paladins of Voltron came along and put an end to all that.

It had to be done, and Hunk would choose Zarkon’s victims over Galra soldiers any day, would choose his own team’s safety over the lives of enemy soldiers, but that didn’t change the fact that they were killers now.

Hunk had made his peace with that fact already—as much as it was possible to _make peace_ with war—but he suspected Lance had been better at ignoring the ugly side of Voltron than Hunk. Perpetual optimism was all well and good until it came crashing down around you.

Watching Lance’s eyes bore holes in the elevator platform now, Hunk felt a twisting of sympathy in his gut.

“There were more than five hundred Merka in this mine,” Hunk said. His voice sounded loud in the open elevator shaft, the darkness stretching miles above them.

Lance looked up, the faint, flickering light of the Galra crystals exaggerating the shadows under his eyes. “What?”

“I’ve been trying to keep count. Five hundred Merka miners are safe because of us.” Hunk paused, searching Lance’s face. “I don’t know about you, but it helps me. Counting. Focusing on the people we’re helping instead of… the rest of it.”

Lance’s eyes widened, and Hunk forced himself not to fidget or look away. It had taken Hunk long enough to figure out what was going on with his best friend; he owed him at least this much.

They maintained eye contact for hardly five seconds before Lance teared up, at which point he swore and turned aside, swiping at his cheeks as he grumbled under his breath and apologized aloud to Hunk. Hunk was beside him in a heartbeat, pulling Lance against him, his throat thick with tears of his own.

“I know, Lance,” Hunk whispered. “I know.”

Lance clung to him the way a drowning man might hold a life preserver, his ragged breath staying just this side of sobs. Hunk double-checked that his comms were muted—Lance had taken off his helmet entirely when they boarded the elevator—and rubbed slow circles on Lance’s back. He was just realizing that it was worse than he’d suspected, and he wished he’d caught on sooner. Way out here in space they only had each other.

They were nearing the surface by the time Lance’s breathing evened out. He still had his face buried in Hunk’s shoulder, his arms around Hunk's middle. Slowly he reached one hand up and curled it around Hunk’s elbow.

“How long have you been counting?” Lance whispered.

Hunk stilled. “This isn’t about me.”

Lance pulled back from him, his eyes still red with tears, but sharp and focused now in a way that said Hunk wasn’t wriggling out of this one. “How long?”

With a sigh, Hunk closed his eyes. “Since the Balmera,” he said. Then, as an afterthought, he went on. “One thousand two hundred and nineteen, by the way. That’s how many Balmerans we saved, according to Shay. And literal millions on Berlou. I figure Berlou alone makes up for anything else we do in this war, just in terms of numbers.”

Lance was still looking at him, his gaze less accusatory now, and Hunk knew that Lance had seen right through him. Through the fake smile and thick skin and the stubborn refusal to make this any harder on his friends than it already was. They were all dealing with the guilt in their own way.

Pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, Lance blew out a long breath. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have realized.”

“Don’t. I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.”

Lance laughed, a weary and broken sound that Hunk thought summed up the situation quite nicely. “Defenders of the Universe, huh? I feel sorry for the universe.”

A sliver of light appeared above them, growing rapidly larger as they continued their ascent. As the light grew, so too did the low murmur of voices and the sounds of shifting bodies. Hunk laid a hand on Lance’s shoulder. “I dunno,” he said. “I’ll bet some of them are pretty happy we wound up as paladins.”

They arrived at the top floor then, and a cheer went up among the two dozen or so Merka who awaited them. The Merka were a short, hairy species that reminded Hunk of moles, with their long snouts and small eyes. Their limbs—four of them, and the Merka seemed to switch freely from standing upright to walking on all fours—were broad and blunt-clawed. Hairs like porcupine quills, only thinner, rose from their head and back, and Hunk couldn’t tell if they were meant for defense or if they acted like whiskers.

As soon as the elevator platform stopped moving, the Merka swarmed Hunk and Lance, five and six at a time squeezing them in short-limbed hugs that barely reached past their waists, others jumping up to smack their shoulders with the flats of their claws in what Hunk thought might be the local equivalent of a high-five—though considerably more painful.

One of the smallest Merka scaled Lance’s back and hugged him around the neck until his face started to go purple. Hunk laughed as Lance staggered, prying back the yellowish claws so he could draw breath. Then, grinning, he pulled the Merka over his shoulder and returned the hug in earnest.

It took a few minutes for the initial celebration to die down, but then the Merka—prompted by someone who introduced herself as Kruchna, a mine foreman (according to her fellow Merka, if not the Galra)--led the way outside to the rest of the freed miners.

“Hey,” Kruchna said, brushing her claws along Hunk’s spine to get his attention. Hunk continued returning hugs from the steady procession of Merka, but he turned toward Kruchna, who blinked twice and nodded. “Thanks.”

Hunk smiled. “You’re welcome! Are all your people okay? We have healing pods on our ship if anyone’s hurt.”

Kruchna shook her head. “Nothing bad. We Merka are tough, y’know. Takes more than a coupla Galra to break our skin.”

“Well that’s a relief,” Lance said, wading over with no fewer than ten Merka hanging off him. Hunk laughed, and Lance shot him a venomless glare as two more Merka jumped on his back. “How long have the Galra been here?”

“Six ruuts,” Kruchna said. Then, seeing the blank looks Hunk and Lance were giving her, she chuckled. “About a third of a standard year?”

Hunk nodded. A standard year wasn’t exactly the same as an Earth year; it was three hundred standard cycles, which were themselves about twenty-six Earth hours—so a year out here was closer to eleven months at home—but it was a reasonable enough approximation. The important thing was the Galra setup here was a relatively new one, and they hadn’t had time to do much damage. Hopefully that would make it easier for the paladins to clear out the rest of the Galra, too.

Hunk started directing Merka toward the lions to shuttle them up to the castle-ship, Allura and Coran having decided it was safer to get the miners off the planet until the fighting was through. He’d barely even caught the Merka’s attention, though, when the Black Lion skimmed low over the foothills and set down beside Yellow.

Exchanging looks with Lance, Hunk disentangled himself from the crowd of Merka and headed toward the Black Lion. They met Shiro at the bottom of the ramp, and Hunk’s eyebrows shot up at the sight of Matt and Allura following behind Shiro.

“All finished here?” Shiro asked.

Hunk nodded, his eyes sticking on Allura and Matt. He’d heard a very brief explanation from Matt about copiloting the Red Lion with Keith—whatever that meant, exactly—and he wondered if Shiro and Allura were trying the same thing. He thought it might be rude to ask, though, so he kept his mouth shut and waited for Shiro to continue.

“Good job. Allura and Coran have pinpointed a couple more military installments, so we’re going to hit those now before we get to work liberating the other mines.”

Beside Hunk, Lance went tense. Matt’s eyes narrowed.

“Actually, uh, Shiro?" Hunk asked in a rush. "Lance promised the Merka he’d give them a ride away from here. Right, Lance?” Hunk paused, but Lance only shot him a startled frown. Hunk hurried on. “It’s okay, though. You and me can handle it, right?”

Shiro’s eyes darted to Lance. “...Sure. I guess that’s okay.”

“Great. I’m just gonna go make sure Kruchna knows what’s happening. Come on, Lance.”

They’d barely made it ten feet before Lance turned his head to level Hunk with a glare. “What was _that_?”

Hunk felt a wave of guilt, cold and slick, but he didn’t back down. “You need a break, Lance. No offense, but you look like you’ve barely slept in the last week.” He held up a hand as Lance started to protest. “Nope. Nuh-uh. No arguments. Take the Merka up to the ship, then _chill._ ”

“But--”

“No buts. Pidge is taking a break from the fighting too, man. So relax. Shiro and I’ve got this one.” He paused, meeting Lance’s eyes. “Seriously. You’ve been pushing yourself way too hard lately. You need this.”

Lance still looked mutinous, but he flipped a hand and muttered his agreement, and that was that.

* * *

Allura hadn’t realized how awkward it would be, standing with Matt behind Shiro as he piloted the Black Lion into battle. It shouldn’t have been; Allura was on good terms with Shiro, and of all the paladins Matt was the one she considered her closest friend. In any other situation, the conversation would have flowed easily.

But here, in _this_ situation, there was an awkward undercurrent. Allura had been caught off guard by Matt’s suggestion that she and Shiro might be able to co-pilot the Black Lion. So much so that she’d failed to adequately mask her eagerness to get back in the pilot’s seat. It was a very un-princess-like thing to do, and she suspected it was the cause of most of the discomfort in the cockpit now.

Understandable. Shiro had been hesitant around her from the first, afraid to mention the Black Lion for fear of offending her. Now he would know just how much she regretted having given up her place at Black’s controls.

He’d slowed his pace as they boarded the lion, as though expecting Allura to take the controls. She’d declined, of course, but now he kept shooting glances at her. Maybe he was afraid she was judging him, comparing him to her own tenure as paladin (though in that regard Allura had to give Shiro top marks. She wasn’t entirely convinced she’d even bonded properly with Black to begin with.) Maybe he was waiting for Matt to guide them through the process of... well, whatever this was.

But Matt offered nothing, just rested a hand on Shiro’s shoulder and flashed Allura excited smiles as they headed toward the military installments on the far side of the planet.

It was just them and Hunk, Lance having remained on the castle-ship after he finished shuttling miners to safety. Allura couldn’t say she was surprised. She’d suspected from the start the promise to the Merka was just an excuse. But Matt had asked them not to press, saying that Lance was dealing with things and could use a break from the fighting.

“Of course,” Shiro had said. “This shouldn’t be a hard battle, anyway.”

And it wasn’t.

Merkul had a certain amount of economic value to Zarkon, but not so much as to make it a tempting target for the various resistance movements harrying the empire. The Merka themselves were a hardy, timid people disinclined to revolution. In short, it was an easy system to hold, and Zarkon hadn’t invested an excess of troops.

After the initial strike, which had incapacitated the sentries on the moons and eliminated the vast majority of the ground forces, all that remained were the small contingents of guards at each mine. Two dozen mines, each with fewer than a hundred Galra, made two thousand soldiers all together, give or take. Some were holed up in the mines; other had already taken their ships and fled the planet. Coran had caught most of these, though a few had managed to slip away.

The rest of the aerial forces came at them in waves. At Matt’s direction, Shiro dove into the thick of battle, taking more risks than he seemed truly comfortable with. Hunk lurked near the edge of the battle, silent but watchful.

Allura followed the battle closely, reaching out to the Black Lion with her mind. She hadn’t used their bond in weeks, but it was still there, and with Matt’s warm presence beside her silently urging her deeper, she let herself admit that it was—could be—a true paladin’s bond. She’d denied that fact for too long, when it should have been obvious. She’d trained with the Blue Lion often enough before the war to know how it felt to pilot a lion who did not fully accept you.

But it was hard to focus on the bond when the Black Lion’s mind brought with it Shiro’s—and her presence in the cockpit made him every bit as uncomfortable as his nearness made Allura.

They were both tense, and they were both trying not to be, and an hour later, when the skies finally cleared and remained so, they were no nearer to copiloting than they had been at the outset.

“It’s probably like forming Voltron,” Matt said as they headed back to the castle. “Almost impossible until you really need it, and then it just… clicks.”

“You’re probably right,” Shiro said. Through Black, Allura felt the sour slump of his disappointment—or maybe that was just her own disappointment coloring her perception. However optimistic Matt wanted to be, it was difficult not to view this as a failure.

Still, she forced a smile and endured the ride back to the castle-ship in silence, nodding politely as Matt tried again to explain what it had been like. Allura followed his explanation about as well as she ignored Shiro’s quiet watchfulness, which was to say not at all. Shiro at least had the tact to not turn toward her, but his eyes followed her in the reflection off a display screen, his expression guarded and thoughtful.

Matt let out a frustrated huff as the Black Lion entered her hangar. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe Keith could explain it better.”

Shiro turned, resting an arm on the back of his seat. “Where is Keith, anyway? I haven’t seen him since you guys got back from the comm relay.”

Matt’s brow furrowed. “I’m… not sure, actually.” He was silent for a long moment, but he shook himself before Allura could ask if something was the matter. “Are we going to hit the other mines right away?”

Allura shook her head. “Whatever troops remain underground will have dug in by now. I’d like to speak with the Merka we’ve rescued, see if they can’t give us an idea of the layout of the other mines.”

“Better to know what we’re getting into so we can plan,” Shiro said, nodding. “I’ll come along with you if you don’t mind.”

“Of course not,” Allura said. She wasn’t sure if it was the truth.

Matt ignored them both, just turned and headed for the ramp. “Sounds good. Shout if you need me.”

* * *

“Hold it steady.” Akira paused behind Thalia’s station in the simulation bank. The image projected on her screen shook as her wing clipped the canon wall, and Akira winced. “Gently,” he said. “This isn’t a race, remember.”

Thalia nodded tersely, muttering under her breath about the time trials—a Garrison-wide competition open to pilots in both the cargo and fighter classes. New simulator courses were released twice a year, and the best times were displayed for the school to see.

For fighter pilots, coming out on top meant extra credit in their flight classes and preference in post-graduation assignments--unofficially, of course. Takashi had placed in the top three every round during his Garrison career—and he’d taken the number one spot five rounds running by the time he graduated. It was generally accepted that that record was what had won him his mission to the International Space Station straight out of basic, and the subsequent solo pilot job on the _Persephone._

For cargo pilots like the ones in this room, though, the only thing at stake was bragging rights and the long-shot hope of winning a spot in the fighter pilot program. Not that a cargo pilot had ever placed higher than seventh place. Not that Iverson would promote the lucky student even if they did smash the fighter kids’ records.

But that didn’t stop them all getting obsessed with it.

Akira bent low to whisper in Thalia’s ear. “Is _this_ the time trial course? Here I thought it was part of your regular training roster. Must be going senile.”

Thalia’s tawny skin flushed crimson. “Sorry, sir.”

Akira gave her a thin smile and straightened up. “Try and focus on one mission at a time, mm-kay?”

He rapped his knuckles twice on her console, then continued on his way around the room. He managed not to openly roll his eyes at the cadets’ single-minded obsession with the time trials, but it was a struggle. He’d never participated in the trials personally, but he remembered many a classmate sacrificing precious hours of sleep to shave off just a few more seconds.

There had always been a divide at the Garrison between the fighter pilots and the cargo pilots. Fighter pilots got the publicity, got the funding, got the fully realized simulators where the cargo pilots had a computer lab with fancy control panels and a thankless career after graduation.

Akira was passing near the back corner of the room when Rafael, who had missed a spot in the fighter class by only a few points, crashed his simulator and dropped his head onto the control panel.

“What’s even the _point_ of this?”

Akira stopped walking.

All around the room, hushed conversations petered out. The sounds of individual simulators cut off abruptly as, one by one, the cadets paused their runs and turned to stare at Akira and Rafael.

For a long moment, Akira basked in this newfound power to command the attention of seventeen-year-olds without saying a word. Then he turned and slowly advanced on Rafael, who tensed and sat up ramrod straight in his seat, not daring to acknowledge Akira’s presence.

“Care to repeat that, cadet?” Akira asked.

Rafael flinched. “No, sir.”

“That’s fine. I heard you anyway.” Akira turned to survey the room. Twenty young faces stared back at him in varying states of anxiety, anticipation, and delight. “Cadet Diaz seems to think that what we’re doing here is is pointless. Anyone else agree with him?”

Dead silence filled the room. Akira began to pace, leaving Rafael to stew in the far corner. He could have dropped the subject, or set Rafael straight without waiting for someone else to chime in, but this was something that had been festering among the students for a long time. And with today marking one week since Val’s disappearance, Akira was in no mood to coddle.

Finally, someone worked up the courage to break the silence. “Well it’s not like we’re fighter pilots.”

Akira’s smile grew, and he turned toward the voice. It had been Liana, he thought. Another one of those cadets who had fallen just short of the cutoff. They were always the most bitter.

“You’re right,” he said. “You’re not fighter pilots. You’re _cargo_ pilots. And you know what no one will tell you about being a cargo pilot?” He waited just long enough for the cadets to brace for the kind of criticism and thinly veiled insults Iverson liked to sling at those he considered wash-outs. Then he crossed his arms and flashed a conspiratorial smile. “We’re the ones who really make a difference.”

The cadets who had been looking at him—only about half the room—tentatively smiled back, while the others whipped around in their seats, suddenly interested once more.

Thalia crossed her arms on the back of the chair. “But… Sir, we’ll never see combat.”

“Meh.” Akira waved a hand and leaned backward against an empty station. “How much good does that really do anyone? We’re the ones who are going to carry fuel and ammunition to the field. We’re the ones bringing medicine and food to remote areas suffering from the war. Fighter pilots may do flashy rescues, but when senior command wants someone smuggled out, they send a cargo pilot. Draws less attention that way.”

Rafael looked petulant, and Akira paused, raising an eyebrow at him. The kid flushed, but that didn't stop him saying what was on his mind: “Our job can’t be all that important if they only put the shitty pilots on those assignments.”

A prickly mutter ran through the room, some cadets agreeing with Rafael, others protesting the label of _shitty pilot_.

Akira waited it out. “Don’t delude yourself, kid. The fact that you’re here at all means you’re in the top ten percent of pilots your age. The Garrison doesn’t take just anyone.”

Thalia and several others sat up straighter at that, surly expressions loosening.

“Also?” Akira went on. “The way they separate cargo pilots from fighter pilots is completely arbitrary. I’ll grant you that fighter pilots are going to be in situations that push their planes to their limits. They need to be able to make snap decisions and keep their heads under fire. But I guarantee you that three-quarters of qualified fighter pilots couldn’t complete half the runs I’ve done.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

Akira didn’t see who it was who had said this, but it didn't really matter. They'd all been thinking it. He leaned back against the desk, hands curling around the edge. “No, really. I’ve flown through heavy fire before, and I did it carrying an experimental weapon that breaks if you so much as _look_ at it wrong. Fighter pilots can take all the hits they want, as long as their engineer can keep them in the air. Cargo pilots? We have to keep their cargo intact—and we don’t get engineers. Something goes wrong that we can’t fix, we’re dead.

“So, yeah, fighter pilots get all the glory. Congratulations, it sucks. Go get a job as a stunt pilot if that’s what you’re after. Those of you who want to make a difference, stay here and learn how to handle a plane with the kind of finesse your fighter pilot classmates can only dream about.”

* * *

The rest of the class went more smoothly than Akira would have thought possible. His rant had turned into a surprisingly effective pep talk without him really meaning it to, and the cadets ran through the simulations with renewed drive. They were still young and inexperienced, of course, and Akira had to plaster on smiles and pretend that they weren’t all flying like drunken monkeys, reminding himself that they still had three years before graduation to get the hang of it.

They were feeling good about their career path, which was better than the whining.

Maybe he could do this teacher thing, after all.

His good mood only lasted until the final students left the simulation bank. Akira grabbed his clipboard, pen, and phone from the instructor’s station and turned toward the door, only to find Commander Iverson already waiting for him.

Akira’s heart leaped into his throat, and he had to force himself not to react. He snapped to attention and inclined his head, his face feeling like stone as he watched Iverson. Had he figured out it was Akira who had helped Val get into the command center? Did he know what they were after? How much they already knew?

Akira was painfully aware that what he was doing—helping Karen, smuggling Val into a restricted area, sharing military secrets with civilians—was risky. He knew he would lose his job, maybe face fines or jail time, depending on how much came out.

But knowing about the consequences in abstract was different from staring them in the eye. This was the man who had taken Val, who had covered up the death or disappearance of three cadets. Who still, maybe, was holding back information about the fate of the _Persephone_ and her crew. Iverson had a reputation as a ruthless strategist and an unforgiving commander.

And he was staring at Akira like he knew all of Akira’s secrets.

Seconds ticked by, and Akira remained at attention, unwilling to be the first to break. He might not know. A long shot, but just in case, Akira didn’t want to give anything away.

After an impossibly long time just standing there scrutinizing Akira, Iverson blinked. “At ease,” he barked, and Akira forced himself to relax on the outside, though inside he remained primed for a fight. “Having trouble with the cadets?”

The question was so far outside the line of interrogation Akira had been expecting that it took him a moment to process it. “Uh… no, sir. No trouble at all.”

Iverson grunted. “Sounded a little bit worked up for no trouble at all.”

 _You were listening to my class?_ Akira wondered. Sure, Akira remembered a few instances during his time as a cadet when one of the senior faculty had sat in on a lesson, but those had all been planned, and announced. This was something closer to eavesdropping; the thought curled in his gut like a snake ready to strike.

If Iverson was listening to his lessons, where else was he being watched?

“They needed a little motivation is all,” Akira said neutrally. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Mm.” Iverson eyed him critically. “I never expected _you_ to end up teaching here.”

A younger Akira would have responded with something snarky like, _What, weren’t all the teachers troublemakers once upon a time?_

The stakes were high now, though, and Akira had to watch his step. “To be honest, it was never one of my career goals.”

“So what changed?”

Akira shrugged. “It’s gotten harder to be out in the field since Takashi died,” he said, which wasn’t a total lie. Everything had gotten harder since Takashi’s death. “I didn’t want to bow out of the game altogether, but I figured a couple years on the ground might do me some good.”

Iverson didn’t respond to that, just went on studying Akira. Akira’s heart pounded in his ears. _He knows. He knows. He knows._

He couldn’t know. Akira had been careful. The only time he’d stepped out of line so far was in entering the command center, but he hadn’t done anything while he was there that would make his goals obvious—if Iverson even knew about it.

 _Stop being paranoid, Shirogane,_ Akira told himself. It didn’t work. He returned Iverson’s unreadable stare with his own and waited for the hammer to fall.

Instead, Iverson merely grunted and opened the door. “All right, then. I’ll see you in thirty days for your next review.”

Akira watched him go, stunned. A performance review? Right, and Akira was here because of his passion for helping the next generation. Iverson suspected something, even he couldn’t prove it. Akira itched to talk to Karen, but he didn’t dare leave the Garrison tonight. Probably he’d been pushing his luck already. He went into town two or three times a week, where the rest of the faculty rarely left campus.

He’d have to cut back. They had the group chat; Akira could use that to keep in touch, and only go to Karen’s house when he absolutely had to.

He would make it work.

* * *

“Where possible,” Keith read, “three or more subjects of the same species have been selected, though it should be noted that a novel species self-described as _human_ is included in this group.”

Pidge’s hands slowed, and they barely heard the next words Keith read, their mind stuck in a loop. _Human._ Matt.

They’d seen his information entered into the master list of research subjects, of course. That file—a spreadsheet listing prisoner IDs, height, weight, age, and various other data points for the prisoners—had been the first one Pidge had translated and compiled. It had been easy once Keith had helped them work out the conversion factors from Galra units to something Pidge could understand. Matt hadn’t been listed by name, but it wasn’t as though there had been a lot of humans on Vel-17.

That was different from actually _reading_ about the kinds of things they’d done to him.

Keith’s voice trailed off, and he lowered the tablet he’d been reading from, watching Pidge with a small frown. “What?”

“Nothing,” Pidge said. They forced themself to focus on the translation, quickly typing out the rest of the sentence. They hadn’t given up on their visual translation software, an addition to the castle-ship’s audio translator that let Pidge and the others read alien languages. But that kind of translation tended to give Pidge a headache if they had to read more than a few paragraphs, whereas if Keith just read the files aloud, the regular old translator would kick in and Pidge could just transcribe the notes.

Keith was still watching Pidge, brow furrowed. His gaze seemed unfocused, though, and when he spoke Pidge wasn’t sure if the words were meant for them or not. “He’s never told anyone, has he? Matt, I mean.”

Pidge kept their eyes locked on their laptop, their hands hovering motionless over the keyboard. “Not me, that’s for sure.”

“Are you sure you want to… you know…?”

Pidge’s eyes tried to dart toward Keith, but they couldn’t make their head move, and their gaze fell on the empty desktop between them. Keith had become a regular fixture in the Green Lion’s hangar over the last few weeks. He wasn’t there all the time, just a few hours every few days, but they’d fallen into a natural rhythm. Keith read the research notes, Pidge transcribed them, they paused occasionally so Keith could get some water or to work through a word or phrase the castle-ship couldn’t translate.

Pidge had begun to build a digital bulletin board along one wall—a mess of partially translated fragments, important quotes and figures, stellar maps with locations marked in red, all layered over one another on a digital projection. It wasn’t quite like the boards their dad had put together when they were little, but it was a good approximation, considering the materials they had on hand.

“We have to,” Pidge said. “That’s the whole point of getting these files, isn’t it? To find out what they did to Matt?” They did their best to put on a brave face, not wanting Keith to see that they were shaken. He hadn’t read as many of the research logs as Pidge had—he could only read so fast, so they’d started with the entries dated a year and a half ago, while Pidge had set the text translator to work on the first two-thirds of the entries.

It was a less precise translation, but it was good enough to give Pidge a fuzzy idea of what sorts of things the Galra had done to their other prisoners.

Maybe Matt hadn’t been selected for those trials. Probably he hadn’t; nearly everyone who had undergone the deprivation experiments had died, and Matt was still here. (Pidge wasn’t sure they believed that line of reasoning, but as long as they didn’t read anything different in the logs, they could make themself believe.)

“You… want to stop for today?”

Pidge painted on a smile and turned toward Keith. “I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

“Sure,” said Keith, still frowning. He drummed his claws on the tabletop, pursing his lips in thought. He opened his mouth once, then closed it with a sigh. Pidge raised an eyebrow. Ears twitching, Keith ducked his head, then forced out what he’d been trying to say. “Maybe I should read through the next logs first, just… to be sure.”

Anger crackled beneath the surface of Pidge’s forced calm. “What, you think I can’t handle it?”

Keith’s head snapped up, his eyes narrowed. “No. All I meant was there’s no point in _both_ of us dealing with this if there isn’t even anything useful.”

“But it’s totally okay for _you_ to go digging through his past? He’s _my_ brother, Keith!”

“I know, but--”

“Maybe there’s a reason he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Pidge said, leveling Keith with their deadliest glare. “He knows I’m doing this; he’s okay with _me_ doing this. Have _you_ asked him? Maybe he doesn’t want you to know.”

Keith laughed suddenly, a single, high note of tension rather than of humor. “Yeah? Well it’s a little late for that.”

Pidge stopped, their breath stalling in their lungs. “What?”

“I— _vrekt_.” Keith screwed his eyes shut and pushed away from the table, standing to pace the room. Pidge swiveled, mind racing, to follow his progress to the door, then back the other way, toward the conspiracy board, where he raised a hand to rifle through the files and images Pidge had pinned there.

They stood, abandoning the translation to chase Keith across the hangar. “You _know_?”

Flinching, Keith came to a stop near Green’s foot and turned, slowly, to face Pidge. “It was an accident.”

“How do you _accidentally_ find out about something Matt won’t talk about?”

Keith shrugged. “You know how you can kind of almost read the others’ minds when we form Voltron?”

Frowning, Pidge shook their head. “Sure, but that’s like… emotions and-and, I don’t know, intent. Not… _this_.”

“Yeah.” Keith raked his fingers through his hair, humming unhappily. “With Voltron. What happened with me and Matt—it’s on a whole other level.”

“Is _that_ why you’ve been avoiding me?”

Keith went rigid, sucking in a sharp breath as Pidge turned toward Matt’s voice. He stood in the doorway, still dressed in his armor, his helmet pinned between his elbow and hip. He was frowning, but Pidge recognized it as a thoughtful look, not an angry one.

“I’m not avoiding you,” Keith muttered, refusing to look at Matt. “I was just helping Pidge with the translation.”

Matt continued to study him for a moment, then shrugged. “If you say so.” He flashed Pidge a smile as he crossed the room, then grabbed Keith by the arm. “Sorry, Pidge. I’m going to have to borrow your helper for a little while.”

Keith resisted Matt’s pull weakly, and Pidge watched the pair head out the door. “Uh… okay?”

Then Pidge was left alone once more. Well, whatever. Not their problem. They returned to the research notes, hesitated, then clicked back to an early entry and continued their work patching up the automated translation.

* * *

Keith eventually managed to pry his arm away from Matt, and he spent the rest of the trip to the training deck silently rubbing his arm. Matt’s hold hadn’t been tight, exactly, but a ghost of his touch lingered on Keith’s skin, needling his thin composure.

It was bad enough that he couldn’t look at Matt without remembering the way their minds had brushed together during the morning’s battle. Now the walls were back up, and Keith couldn’t begin to guess what Matt was thinking or why he wanted to talk to Keith.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be pleasant.

But when they reached the training deck—empty, of course; as far as Keith knew the other paladins were all still out fighting—Matt led him out to the center of the room and sat cross-legged. He gestured for Keith to do the same.

They sat there facing each other, awkward silence filling the room, for several long minutes.

Eventually, Matt broke the silence. “Is everything all right?”

Keith stared at him, dumbstruck. “What?”

“Is everything all right?” Matt repeated. “Are _you_ all right? You seem…”

Keith waited for him to finish. _You seem_ … what? Angry? Offended? He wasn’t—not really. He was trying not to be. It was ironic, really, that Matt was asking about Keith’s well-being after everything that had passed between them in the Red Lion.

“I’m fine,” Keith said tersely.

Frowning, Matt studied him, his gaze disconcertingly intense. “Are you sure? I get it—if that was too much. You’ve probably never done something like that before; I know _I_ haven’t. If you’re not comfortable co-piloting with me, that’s fine. We can take it one step at a--”

“If _I’m_ uncomfortable?” Keith held up his hands, confusion turning his thoughts into a slurry. “Sorry, _what_?”

Matt seemed caught off guard by Keith’s response, and his mouth worked silently for a few seconds before he found his voice. “You’re uncomfortable,” Matt said. Asked? Keith didn’t know if he was supposed to respond to it, so he stayed silent while Matt’s face scrunched up. “Aren’t you? What happened in Red was sudden and intense and I figured… You mean you _aren’t_ freaked out by the whole shared brain thing?”

Was he joking? Keith scowled at Matt, searching for signs of the lie. “No,” he said. “You’re the only one messed up by this. I was trying to give you space.”

“I…what? Keith, I don’t know why you think I have a problem with this, but--”

“Cut the crap, Holt.” Keith balled his hands into fists on his knees to keep himself from snarling.

 _Breathe. Calm down._ He’d done enough harm already.

He closed his eyes and focused on keeping his voice level, keeping his body still and loose. He was keenly aware of Matt’s presence across from him, the way he’d suddenly tensed. A small motion, but one that sank its teeth into Keith's gut. Shadows danced at the edges of his mind, stolen memories, trails of linked memories leading back to pain and fear.

“I was inside your head,” Keith said in a low voice. “I know.”

“Know what?”

The feigned ignorance, the forced levity of Matt’s tone, struck a cord in Keith, anger reverberating throughout his body in search of an outlet. _No._ He bit down on his tongue until the anger ebbed and he tasted blood.

“I know what they did to you.” Keith paused as Matt sucked in a sharp breath. “I know that you still dream about it, that the lab is always there at the edge of your mind.” He paused, throat constricting, and had to remind himself to breathe. “I know what it does to you to look at me.”

Matt stilled. “You… Oh.” Keith closed his eyes, listening to the sound of Matt’s breathing, slow and deliberate. He shifted, footsteps sounding loud to Keith’s ears. They stopped directly in front of him, and Matt’s knee brace rasped as he knelt down. “Keith. Keith, look at me.”

Keith did so. There was very little room between them now, Matt’s knees mere inches from Keith’s, his hazel eyes bright and piercing. Keith averted his gaze.

“What they did to me on Vel-17, Keith… it has nothing to do with you.”

A laugh bubbled up inside Keith and he pulled back, climbing halfway to his feet before Matt grabbed his arm to hold him in place. The connection they’d shared in battle was gone now, but Keith remembered well enough the surge of fear that was so closely intertwined in Matt’s mind with Galra. _All_ Galra, including Keith. Keith refused to let that sting. He had no right to be hurt over this. He _wouldn't_ let his own ego take away from Matt's suffering.

With a thin smile, Keith pulled away. “I don’t blame you, Matt. I get it. You need time to heal. It’s—that’s fine. You should have told me.”

“No, Keith, I--” Matt paused, his eyes darting back and forth like the right answer was written somewhere on Keith’s face and he was trying to find it. “I didn’t want you to think I blamed you.”

“But it’s not about blame, is it?”

Matt opened his mouth to argue, then sighed. They were both standing now, Matt’s arms wrapped around himself, Keith’s hanging useless at his sides. Matt turned his head to stare at the far wall. “No,” he said. “I guess it’s not. But—can we talk? Before you go deciding that what I need is for you to stay away from me, just… please. Hear me out.”

Keith nodded. He owed Matt that much.

They sat again, side by side this time, their backs against the wall. Keith let his legs spread out, trying to exude a calm, non-threatening demeanor, while Matt curled in on himself, hugging his good knee to his chest and resting his chin atop it.

“You’re right,” he whispered. “There are still things that take me back there. Sounds, scents, certain gestures. They're not all inherently bad, they just… There are things that are burned into me, and some of those scars are so wide they swallow other things. Things that I know aren’t a threat but--” He paused, swearing. “I wanted to deal with this on my own. I thought if I didn't tell you, then you wouldn't have to feel bad about it.”

Keith’s heart twinged painfully, and he turned his head to look at Matt. “You shouldn’t _have_ to deal with it on your own.”

“I know. I just—don’t want anyone to think I’m weak.”

“No one thinks that.”

Matt smiled, thin and feeble. “Thanks, Keith. But I can’t keep living in my own head. Sooner or later I’m going to have to get past this. I _want_ to get past this.”

Keith’s hands itched to fidget with his knife, but he forced them to be still, pressing his palms flat against his thighs. “But if it hurts you, why put yourself through that?”

“Because it’s worth the effort,” Matt said. “Because _you’re_ worth the effort.”

An unexpected lump of emotion grew in Keith's throat. "Matt..."

Smiling a little more warmly, Matt leaned his head against the wall. “I’m not the only one who’s been through shit. You gave up everything to save Shiro, to help us all. I’m not going to avoid you just because of what happened to me. And it’s getting better. I’m not through it entirely, not yet, but someday I will be. I just want to make sure that when I make it there I haven’t already ruined the friendship we could have had.”

“And I don’t want you hurting because of me.”

“I’m not.”

Keith huffed, disdainful. He didn’t have to say it again—he’d been in Matt’s head. He knew Matt _was_ hurting. Maybe he could push through it, maybe he thought it was a small sacrifice to make, but even so…

“I want to try something,” Matt said, standing. He crossed to an inset panel in the wall. Pressing a hidden switch caused a console to raise nearby. Matt crossed to it, then bent and pulled out two headsets from the cabinet underneath the controls.

“The mind meld device?” Keith asked.

“If you’re okay with that.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Keith nodded, and Matt flipped the power switch on the console. Soft blue lights on the headsets lit up, and Matt gestured Keith back out into the middle of the room where they sat cross-legged facing each other. They locked eyes, then silently lifted the headsets and settled them into place.

Keith felt his mind spool outward like melting ice, filling channels carved by the mind meld device. Matching rivulets of Matt’s thoughts ran down to meet him, pooling and mixing much as they had done in the Red Lion earlier.

Their minds circled each other, wary, reaching out only to recoil as they brushed up against uncomfortable thoughts. The darkness of Vel-17 called to Keith like an insidious whisper, but he gave that part of Matt’s mind a wide berth. To go there felt like an intrusion, and Keith had trespassed enough already.

The motion stirred up thoughts of Lance, of his threats on Berlou, of the cold, guilty place that grew a little larger each time Lance saw Keith and stalked away.

This time it was Matt who withdrew, a silent apology spreading from his mind like a cloud.

They continued to dance around each other for a time, Keith’s discomfort and self-consciousness growing as the seconds crept on and their link faltered time and again.

It would have been easier, he thought, if either one of them had been Shiro.

Matt’s mind calmed and Keith, suddenly startled out of his thoughts, opened his eyes to find Matt watching him, a small smile on his face.

“Shiro means a lot to you.”

“Sorry.”

Shaking his head, Matt closed his eyes and reached out through the bond toward Keith. A shimmering thread of memory descended toward Keith, who hesitated for only a moment before accepting Matt’s tacit invitation.

“ _I miss them,” Matt admitted, running his fingers over the photograph taped to the wall. It showed a younger Pidge than the one Keith knew, and Matt, dressed in an orange uniform. Behind them stood two adults, presumably their parents._

“ _I’m sure they miss you, too.”_

 _Keith watched through Matt’s eyes as he turned toward Shiro—younger, brighter, his face unmarked by scars, his hair black throughout. He was smiling, and Matt’s lips quirked into a smile in return. They floated alone together in what the shared memory told Keith was the personnel quarters on the ship_ Persephone _, which had taken Matt and Shiro to Kerberos._

“ _I still have to figure out how to sneak a space rock back to Katie,” Matt said._

_Shiro laughed, and reached out to take Matt’s hand. The lightest tug brought Matt drifting closer, until Shiro was able to wrap him in an embrace, warm and strong. His smile turned devious, and he reached up to tug on a lock of Matt’s hair._

“ _We can always smuggle it back in this mane of yours.”_

Keith breathed in, sharp, caught between the memory and the training room and the glittering nothingness of the mind meld. The strength of Matt’s love for Shiro remained, a fierce, steady warmth that spiraled around their linked minds like a comet’s tail.

“I would have lost him without you,” Matt said.

Keith looked at him, and he saw a juxtaposition of the younger, happier Matt from his memories with this version, tired and war-weary with a knee that ached and a year of darkness trying its best to consume everything else Matt held within him.

“They would have destroyed him,” Keith said, an urgency in his chest forcing the words out in a rush of air. “I just—I couldn’t let them destroy him.”

Memory rose, and Keith felt the weight of Matt’s attention on it, silent but controlled.

Keith took a deep breath, then opened his mind to Matt.

_They stood beside the Arena, silent and still among the roaring Galra. Shiro stood on the floor below, fighting an Anuvin. (Other memories crowded around this one. Other fights, other victims. Keith shied away from them, and Matt let them fade into the void. He knew: Keith’s secrets were not all his alone to share.)_

_Below them, Shiro fought, but Keith saw himself on the sand, an unfamiliar sword in hand, fear thrilling in his chest, the weight of an inescapable future pressing down on him._

_Keith and Shiro moved as one across the Arena, inexorably linked, indistinguishable from one another until Keith struck down his enemy, and Shiro spared his._

“You saw yourself in him,” Matt said, the memory slipping away from them.

Keith shook his head. “I saw who I could have been if I was…better. If I was strong.”

Matt smiled. “You already are, Keith. You’re so much more than what they tried to make of you.”

 _I don’t know about that,_ Keith thought, but the memories were all around, and Keith opened them up to Matt as Matt did the same for him. They dove together through their minds, exploring. Explaining. Keith showed Matt his childhood, his mother's warm laughter and quiet kindness and fierce strength. He showed Matt as much of his time with Shiro as he could without betraying Shiro’s trust. Matt, in turn, showed Keith his life on Earth. Happier times, when Matt was free to laugh and love without the shadow of the Galra hanging over him.

Slowly the awkwardness of linking minds faded, and Matt drew Keith toward that dark corner of their minds where Vel-17 slept.

They did not delve into those memories, for which Keith was grateful—Matt, too, he thought. But Keith could see them, dark and festering. They cast out gnarled cords like ivy, coiling around brighter memories. Keith could see the remnants of these cords in the surface memories, placed where Matt had cut back the invading weeds. They left dark stains as they retreated, but the darkness healed with time, leaving Matt’s mind clearer than it had been.

Heart aching, Keith reached out toward one such tendril, which had coiled itself around the base of their connection and seemed intent on constricting until the bond shriveled and Keith was driven off.

As soon as Keith’s fingers brushed the cord, the shimmering strands of his own memory sprung up around him. The dark cord shivered and thinned where their light landed.

Matt appeared beside him, his hand joining Keith’s on the invading memory. He yanked, and the cord crumbled to ash.

“I want you here, Keith,” Matt said. “I’m not going to let my past chase you out.”

Emotions welled up inside Keith, too powerful to put into words, but he suspected Matt understood. Gratitude for Matt's trust and acceptance. Sorrow for his pain. Uncertainty and hope and helplessness and frustration and the desperate, all-consuming desire to be good enough.

They remained beside each other until the bond began to fade and they each settled back into their own bodies on the training room floor.

Keith removed his headset and held it in his hands, staring thoughtfully down at it as Matt did the same. Things hadn't changed, not really. Matt was still suffering, still struggling against the ghosts of his imprisonment. But Keith saw more clearly now the complicating factors. If Matt really wanted Keith there--and Keith believed him when he said he did--then Keith would stay.

Keith nodded to himself, and looked up at Matt. “How can I help?”

* * *

Allura hadn’t intended to go down into the computer core. After she and Shiro had talked with the Merka, they’d split off: Shiro to check in with the younger paladins, Allura to find Coran and finalize their plans for the next day. But Coran hadn’t been on the bridge.

Allura had been about to head to the infirmary or the kitchens in search of him when her eyes had fallen on the hatch leading down to the computer core.

The odds that Coran was _actually_ there were slim, but a nagging little voice dragged her over, and once she was down in the dim, cool chamber beneath the bridge, all thoughts of Coran and the battle for Merkul flew out of her head.

“Hello, Allura.”

Tension coiled in Allura’s bones, and she took a moment to prepare herself before she turned to greet the ship’s AI.

Somehow it still shocked her how much it looked like her father. The silvery hair so like her own. The beard he’d grown because he thought all kings ought to have beards. The kind blue eyes and the sad smile.

Allura closed her eyes and brushed past the hologram without a word.

“What’s the matter, Allura? Don’t you have a moment to spare for your father?”

“You are _not_ my father.”

She turned, leveling the hologram with a frigid stare.

It cocked its head to the side, seemingly confused by Allura’s statement. “Of course I am. Do you not recognize me, daughter?”

The hologram spread its arms wide, an invitation Allura had seen many times before. Her eyes burned, but she refused to shed tears for this poor recreation of her father. “I don’t care what you look like,” she said through clenched teeth. “You are a computer program that stole King Alfor’s face, and that is _all_ you are.”

“What more is there?”

Allura laughed, turning aside and blinking furiously as the back of her throat began to burn. She knew she couldn’t blame the AI. It was programmed to equate itself with the profile of the previous monarch. Except for a few hazy memories from her childhood, this was the only way Allura had ever known her grandmother. Back then, the castle had been able to draw on Queen Revalia’s memories to flesh out the illusion.

It wasn’t the AI’s fault King Alfor had deleted his own memories before his death, but that didn’t make the ache any easier to bear.

“Fine,” she said thickly. “If you’re my father, then tell me. Where did we go after Mother died?”

The AI opened its mouth to answer, then froze. Allura waited, taking no satisfaction in outwitting a faulty program, as the computer searched in vain for the information it needed to answer her question. The hologram had gone unnaturally still, its lips slightly parted, its eyes unblinking as it stared through Allura.

Allura breathed out. “That’s what I thought,” she whispered. “Computer, disengage user interface.”

The image of King Alfor flickered, then disappeared, leaving Allura alone in the dimly-lit computer core. She hesitated only a moment before she crossed to the line of memory cylinders lining the outer wall. She stopped at the last one in the line, which contained her mother’s memories. They stirred at her approach, swirling like a nebula within the glass cylinder, a few bright pinpricks twinkling like stars.

She hadn’t been to see her mother since the weeks following her death, and never alone. Always before Coran had been with her, or Meri, or sometimes Rukka or Sa. She hesitated now, her fingers hovering over the controls.

Her hand shook, and one finger brushed the touchpad, which was enough to wake the system. It hummed, lights flickering on as it warmed up the memory lattice and prepared to form a hologram. Allura was seized with the impulse to stop the process, to run back up to the relative safety of the bridge, where ghosts of the ancient past couldn’t haunt her.

Instead she stayed, transfixed, her hand still hovering over the controls as her mother took shape before her.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Lealle said. “I’ve missed you.”

Allura squeezed her eyes shut, but not in time to stop a few tears from escaping. “I missed you, too, Mother.”

A cold, nearly intangible presence wrapped around Allura’s shoulders, a ghost of a hug. It didn’t compare to the real thing, but the holograms were limited in their capacity for physical touch. This was as good as she was going to get. Allura leaned into her mother’s embrace, focusing only on the sound of her own breathing, shaky and shallow.

When she’d regained her composure, Allura sat back and opened her eyes. Her mother looked just as she always had: warm brown skin, tinged blue now with the glow of the hologram. Dark hair that curled around her ears. Yellow-brown eyes framed by deep blue _glaes_ on her cheekbones. She wore the blue paladin’s armor—all except the helmet—and she wore it with a depth of comfort that came with long practice.

Lealle still looked young, though she had been well into middle age by the time she died. Maybe that was just the hologram. It did have a way of smoothing out the wrinkles, erasing the scars. The memory profiles were a way of unwinding the flow of time, so perhaps Allura was looking at a younger version of her mother, before the war had taken its toll.

“It’s been so long,” Lealle said, poking Allura’s side until she managed a watery laugh. “What’s wrong?”

Allura’s smile turned brittle. “Wrong? Why does something have to be wrong? Can’t a daughter come visit her mother out of simple courtesy?”

One of Lealle’s eyebrows arched delicately. It was a skill she and Coran shared, and it had the same effect on Allura regardless of the source.

Hunching her shoulders, Allura took a seat on the small bench seat by the memory cylinder. Lealle sat beside her.

“I came for advice.”

“To me?” Lealle laughed, the sound reminiscent of chatta birds singing just before dawn. “Things must be more dire than I thought, if you’re scraping the bottom of the wisdom barrel.”

Allura pursed her lips, which only made Lealle laugh again. “I’ve come to you for advice plenty of times before.”

“Sure,” said Lealle, a crooked grin on her face. “So who’s the lucky girl? Or is it a boy this time?”

“Mother!” Flustered, Allura reached up to tuck her hair behind her ear. Her face felt hot, and she steadfastly ignored the schoolgirl grin her mother was sending her way. “This isn’t about that. It’s about the paladins.”

Lealle let out a disappointed grunt. “Well that’s _far_ less fun.”

“And far _more_ important,” Allura said. She turned, smothering a smile. Lealle was all the things her husband was not: loud, irreverent, an incessant tease. Unlike Alfor and Allura, she had not been raised in a castle, but on a merchant vessel, where she learned to barter and drink and crack jokes that would make Alfor’s voice falter and his cheeks burn.

Among a team of paladins trained in diplomacy, tactics, and meditation, Lealle stuck out like a Lion in a kriff pen. Alfor had once said that was what had drawn him to her, the same way Coran’s brash, unabashed stories that drawn _them_ together.

Lealle’s loud mood quieted, and she nudged Allura with her knee. “What is it? Honestly?”

A sigh had been building behind Allura’s walls for days, and she let it out now, slouching in her seat as her mother’s eyes watched her, quiet and keen. “I can’t do this,” Allura said, ashamed to hear a waver in her voice. Her tutors would have been appalled—a princess showing such weakness.

Lealle only took her hand. “That’s not a problem, Allura. That’s a statement—and a blatant lie at that. What’s the _problem_?”

“What _isn’t_ the problem? Matt’s body is being overrun with crystals, and nothing Shay can do seems to slow their growth. Pidge is hardly sleeping—they think I don’t notice, but I do. They haven’t set foot in their room except to change clothes in a week! Lance can’t endure more than ten civil seconds with Keith, no matter what I do.”

“Have you tried sticking them both in the airlock and telling them you’re going to eject them into space if they don’t learn to get along?”

Allura stared at her mother, momentarily lost for words.

Lealle shrugged, scratching the back of her head. “Hey, it worked for Zarkon and Keturah.”

Frowning, Allura opened her mouth, then closed it and moved on without acknowledging her mother’s suggestion. “The ironic thing is that after all this time pushing the paladins to work together, to open their minds and trust one another, to work as a team… I can’t do the same thing when it’s asked of me.”

Allura pulled her feet up onto the seat beneath her and wrapped her arms around her knees, as if she were a child again and not a grown woman leading the universe’s only hope of defeating Zarkon.

“I tried, Mother. I could sense the Black Lion, and I could sense Shiro’s mind, and I wanted to connect so much it hurt, but… it was like there was a chasm there I couldn’t cross. Like I’d locked myself out of that bond and lost the key, and I don’t know _why_. I’ve flown the Black Lion before. We formed Voltron. So _why_ can’t I do this? Am I just that selfish? I want so badly to be the black paladin again that there’s no room in my heart for another?”

She turned toward her mother, hoping for reassurance, for advice, for the kind of optimism and sympathy and practicality that had made Lealle such an asset to her team.

Instead, she found the hologram staring blankly into space, unnaturally still, her lips parted slightly and her head tilted to one side.

Pain thudded through Allura. This wasn’t her mother. It might look like Lealle and sound like her. It might have her memories. But it was still just a computer trying its best to imitate someone long dead. When it ran into a question its memory profile couldn’t answer, it revealed itself for what it truly was: A bundle of light and memories without any of the answers Allura so desperately needed.

Vision blurring, Allura reached out to deactivate the hologram display, and as the room around her faded back to quiet darkness, she buried her face in her knees and cried.

They were gone. Lealle and Alfor. The other paladins, all of Allura’s friends on Altea and on the castle-ship. Everyone she’d ever known except Coran and Zarkon himself was long dead and forgotten. It was just Allura now, silently bearing the legacy of an entire people—and failing miserably.

How could she expect anything of the paladins when she was falling apart herself?

She didn’t know how long she stayed there, letting weeks of buried grief wash over her. She’d held herself together as long as she was able, pushing aside the pain of loss to better focus on the war because she knew, she _knew_ , that once the floodgates opened there would be no end.

She didn’t hear Coran’s approach until he sat beside her and pulled her against him, his arms encircling her shoulders, his chin coming to rest atop her head. Sniffling, she resisted, but only for a moment. This was Coran, who had held her during battles when she was a child and the sounds of lasers on the castle’s shields made her sick with worry. This was Coran, who had held her when her mother died and she screamed herself hoarse with suicidal plans to go after Zarkon herself.

This was Coran, who must have been grieving himself for the world they’d lost, but who had only ever been strong and comforting when Allura needed him most.

She’d tried to be strong for him, as well, but she no longer had the energy. She was tired, and she was frustrated, and she missed her family, so she leaned into Coran’s embrace and listened to him hum an old, familiar lullaby until her tears had run their course.

“I’m not them,” Allura whispered.

Coran rubbed slow circles on her back, the lullaby fading as he considered her words. “No,” he said at length. “You’re _you_ , and that’s more than enough.”

Allura shook her head. “It’s not. Mother knew about unity. She could have brought this team together. She would have known how to co-pilot the Black Lion with Shiro. And Father—he was so much more than I will ever be. Wise and kind and strong.” Allura’s fingers curled around the fabric covering Coran’s back. “It should be them here, not me.”

She felt the weight of the memory cylinders around her. Hundreds of years of her ancestors, of the paladins who had come before. Heroes and diplomats and geniuses, who had protected the universe in their time. Could they see her, she wondered? Did they know the state of the universe under Zarkon’s rule? Did they know how little Allura had done to restore justice and freedom to the people he had enslaved?

“Very little in this universe is as it should be,” Coran said, his voice hardly more than a whisper. “But for what it’s worth? There’s no one I would rather have leading us in this fight than you.”

Allura had thought she’d run out of tears, but her eyes welled up again, and she hugged Coran tighter. “I have no idea what I’m doing,” she said.

“No one does.”

Allura shook her head, her frustration rising up like a restless beast, clawing at her throat, burrowing through her heart in an effort to find release. “My father would have known what to do. There are _so many_ people counting on us. All of Zarkon’s victims. All of Altea— _our_ people--I have to bear their legacy. They deserve someone more experienced than me.”

Coran was quiet for a long while, still rubbing Allura’s back. She allowed the motion to lull her, soothing her tears and steadying her pulse.

When Coran spoke again, his voice seemed somehow out of place in the darkness. “Do you know why King Alfor deleted his memory profile?”

Allura pulled back to frown at Coran. “I assumed it was because of Mother’s AI. He always hated it, right from the start. He said it could never compare to the real thing.” Allura hadn’t understood her father’s bitterness at the time, but she was beginning to now.

“That’s true,” said Coran, “but that’s not why he did what he did.”

“Then why?”

“He didn’t want you to see him as a failure. He knew you would turn to his AI as a guide, that you would see every place he failed to live up to his position. How he didn’t see Zarkon’s betrayal coming. How he failed to protect the other paladins. How everything he did in the war—both before and after he placed you in the cryopod—was done out of fear.”

Coran’s voice dropped low, and his eyes—trained on the central core that stored the castle’s AI—seemed older than Allura had ever noticed.

“He wasn’t prepared for this war, any more than you are. I disagreed with a great many of his decisions. I disagreed with his decision to erase his memory profile. But I still followed him. He was only mortal, Allura. He made mistakes, as we all do. That didn’t make him any less worthy to be the King of Altea.” He turned, smiling, to Allura. “It doesn’t make _you_ any less worthy to be Queen.”

Allura wasn’t sure she agreed with Coran. Her father had been a great man, and a great leader. He’d led his paladins to a great many victories, and done so with more grace than Allura could boast. Maybe some day Allura would live up to his legacy, but that day was not today.

But she managed a smile for Coran. His faith in her was bolstering, all the more so because she knew he never offered empty praise. He valued honesty, so his opinion—skewed though it might have been by their close bond—carried a lot of weight.

“One can hardly have a queen without a people,” she said, then gave a teary laugh. “But thank you. I will do my best to make you proud.”

Smiling, Coran kissed the top of her head. “You already have, Allura, a thousand times over.”

* * *

The castle was quiet as evening approached. Lance had managed to avoid everyone for a solid four hours since returning with the last mob of Merka miners, shutting himself in his room with the lights off, steadfastly ignoring anyone who came knocking.

Shiro, surprisingly, was the most persistent.

“I know you’re in there, Lance,” he said, voice muffled by the door but close enough that Lance could picture him leaning right up against the metal, his brow furrowed. “If you don’t want to talk to me right now, that’s fine.”

He paused for a long time, and Lance figured he’d given up.

But he went on, his voice steady and soothing. “I know I’ve been pushing you hard these last few weeks. Too hard. I should have realized the toll it was taking sooner, but I didn’t. I’m sorry. If you ever feel overwhelmed, please tell me.”

Lance froze up, his hands, wrapped around his leg, tightening on the seams of his jeans. Shame pressed down on him, crushing and restless.

“I’ve been there, Lance, believe me. I know how tempting it is to pretend everything’s fine, to push through it and hope it goes away.” Shiro paused, his voice dropping low so Lance had to strain to hear it. “It won’t go away. Not if you ignore it.”

It sounded like the kind of thing any adult would say to make a kid feel better, empty advice without any real substance. But Shiro’s voice was raw with emotion in a way Lance had never heard before. It made him wonder who Shiro was--or who he had been, before this war. Him and Matt and Allura--they weren't really that much older than the rest of them, for all they seemed to have their shit together.

“Take care of yourself, Lance,” Shiro said. “Whatever that means for you. Rest. Sit out of the next battle. I’m here if you want to talk. If not… then just know that war is hell, and it affects everyone differently. The fact that it hits some of us especially hard doesn’t make us weak.”

There was an expectant silence, during which Lance almost convinced himself to open the door. He didn’t know what he would say, or if he would just end up crying into Shiro’s shoulder like he’d cried on Hunk’s earlier.

Then Shiro shifted, something rasping against the door, and the opportunity passed.

“Sleep well, Lance,” Shiro said.

Then he was gone, and Lance was alone again.

He tried to sleep, but while the darkness was good for a great many things—moping, relieving the carnage of battle, replaying two weeks worth of hostile non-conversations with Keith—it was not great for sleeping. Not today. Not when Lance’s mind refused to shut up.

Five hundred Merka.

Five hundred innocent lives saved because of a slaughter. The numbers didn’t help as much as Lance thought they would. A death was still a death, and knowing it had kind of, sort of, in a roundabout way, done some good didn’t wash the blood from Lance’s hands.

 _Focus on the one’s you’ve saved,_ Hunk had said. _Forget the rest of it._ But Shiro had said almost the exact opposite. _It won't go away if you ignore it._ They couldn't both be right, could they? But then, what did that mean? Was Lance supposed to face the guilt head-on, or ignore it? If he continued to bury his head in the sand, he might at least do _some_ good for the team.

If he faced it, he thought he might fall apart entirely.

As the castle-ship’s rhythm slowed for the sleep cycle, machinery powering down, lights dimming from bright, cheery blue to a dim red, Lance forced himself to stand. If sleep wasn’t coming, he might as well be productive.

He flipped on the manual lights, drowning out the motes of red at the corners of the room, and pulled the Altean sewing machine out of the closet. Bolts of fabric followed, and half a dozen unfinished projects. Pidge had asked for a new hoodie, as the one they’d brought from Earth had a hole in the pocket, and Lance had finally coaxed some comments out of Shiro about what kind of clothing he actually liked.

Lance thought best when his hands were busy. Something familiar, something calming like sewing gave his mind a chance to wander and to puzzle out problems that otherwise would have just tied themselves in knots. He’d started a lot of projects while thinking, and many of them had been abandoned for far too long, or had become so ambitious that Lance had decided to wait for a day when he would have a few hours to work uninterrupted.

Well, it wasn’t _day_ , exactly, but day and night were one and the same in space, and Lance had a _lot_ of thinking to do. He settled himself at the sewing machine, grabbed a shirt stuck more full of pins than stitches, and got to work.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case any of you missed it, I put up two new fics this week (pinch hits for the Voltron Secret Santa.) They are:
> 
> [Sorry, Who are You?](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9203204) (Oneshot. Klance childhood friends AU--Keith and Lance went to the same school for a year as kids, but when they reunite at the Garrison, Keith doesn't remember who Lance is.)
> 
> [Love and Other Questions](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9237575/chapters/20949500) (Multichapter, ongoing. Canonverse Soulmate AU featuring both romantic and platonic soulmates, and some gray areas in between. Shiro/Matt, Keith/Lance, Hunk/Shay, plus platonic soulmates Keith & Shiro, Pidge & Matt, Pidge & Keith, Hunk & Lance.)
> 
> Later this week I'll also be launching the Coran-centric side-story I promised at the end of season one: _One Week to Say Goodbye_. (Featuring Zarkon, Lealle, and the other paladins, along with (of course) Alfor, Allura, and Coran.)


	6. The Fallen and the Future

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time: After copiloting Red with Keith, Matt was excited to test the Black Lion's potential for dual paladin shenanigans, but his efforts with Shiro and Allura amounted to nothing. Allura went to talk to her mother's AI for advice, but the computer doesn't have enough information on dual paladins to be of much help. Meanwhile Matt found Keith helping Pidge with translations and dragged him off to talk. After glimpsing Matt's memories of Vel-17, Keith was afraid his presence would only hurt Matt further, but Matt wasn't having any of that. Even if it takes time for those scars to heal, Matt wants Keith in his life. It's a struggle, he admitted, but it's worth it.
> 
> Hunk and Lance finally got a chance to talk about the morality of war, and Hunk admitted he's been counting how many people they save as a way to fight off the guilt. Shiro stopped by to offer his own support but, Lance still needs to find his own answer. Unable to sleep, he instead pulled out his sewing projects and got to thinking.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1321  
>  Dated ten months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Notes on subject 5Cf; prisoner ID 155-9870*, a summary (see log entries 1307-1320 for full observations):
> 
> \--5C entered extended deprivation chamber #2 fifteen solar cycles ago, following baseline isolation statistics that showed minimal physiological stress effect.
> 
> \--Since entering the chamber, 5C’s physical state has remained satisfactory; some muscular atrophy observed as well as weight loss consistent with liquid diet. Stress hormone levels peaked at four days, then began to decline, along with high-level brain activity.
> 
> \--At five cycles (75% mortality threshold across all subjects) 5C began to exhibit violent motor activity resulting in moderate physical injury. Paralytic agent introduced within three hours.
> 
> \--At ten cycles (99% mortality threshold for non-feral species) 5C was officially classified as a feral species and redesignated 5Cf. Feral-type subjects constitute fewer than 10% of all observed species. Quintessential deprivation in such species does not result in death, but rather a regression to base instinctual behavior often characterized by violence and single-minded lust for Quintessence.
> 
> 5Cf will remain in E-Dep chamber #2 for further observation.

*Pidge’s notes: According to Matt, Prisoner 155-9870 was named Aurel. Possible connection between her and the monster we fought on Shay’s Balmera?

* * *

Lance stayed up all night, sewing clothes and thinking about—well, everything. Keith and the other Galra, Lance's own place on the team, Lealle. He hadn’t intended to pull an all-nighter, hadn’t even really realized how much time had passed (though, in retrospect, the half dozen pieces he’d finished maybe should have clued him in.) He’d just been in the zone.

The funny thing was that, despite not sleeping a wink, when the room’s lights came on at dawn, Lance found himself more clear-headed than he’d been in weeks. As the new clothes had taken shape, so had his thoughts, pulled apart from their ugly knots and laid out like pattern pieces. Now all he had to do was stitch them together.

Someone knocked on the door as he was feeding his scraps down the trash chute in the corner.

“It’s open!” Lance called, and the door slid aside to reveal Hunk and Shay, both looking way too chipper for five minutes past space-dawn. “Oooh, Shay, good timing!” Lance had folded and stacked all the new clothes before he started gathering up the trash, and he scurried over to the pile now, setting aside Pidge’s hoodie and Shiro’s new vest so he could get to the dress underneath.

Lance had already made Shay a new tunic, of course. Her old one had been grimy from mining and worn almost to rags, and Lance had gotten to work as soon as he knew she’d joined the team. Dresses and tunics were easy, even if Shay’s build was light-years away from Lance’s little sister’s. The only challenge had been getting Shay to give him feedback. He’d had to settle for a near replica of her old clothes on the first pass.

This time, he’d gone a little fancier. Not Allura’s-royal-gowns fancy, but Lance had caught Shay and Allura sporting matching nail polish last week, so he figured something a little less utilitarian might be appreciated. He’d found some lightweight fabric, white spotted with yellow flowers, and made a simple little V-neck sundress.

Shay gasped when she saw it, as if Lance had made her an evening gown studded with diamonds. “How beautiful,” she said, reaching out almost reverently. “But you need not have--”

“Ah-ah-ah.” Lance fluttered a hand to halt her protests, then passed the dress into her hands. “Too late. It’s made, it’s yours.”

Shay hugged the dress against her chest, smiling. “Well, then, you have my gratitude, Lance. I will have to repay you somehow.”

Lance was already shaking his head. “Clothes are freebies,” he said. “Everyone needs ‘em, I like making ‘em. Nobody owes Hunk for making dinner, and nobody owes me for making clothes.”

“But--”

“Lance is right, Shay,” Hunk said, beaming at her. “You’re family now, no IOUs.”

Shay’s eyes widened, but Lance just beamed, thinking of the other clothes he’d made—those sitting on the bed behind him as well as the ones the other paladins were already wearing. _Family._ Yeah, that sounded about right. He was a trillion miles from Earth, but they’d made themselves a quirky little home here in the castle-ship.

Shay was still standing there, staring down at the new dress, so Lance tugged Hunk out into the hallway and shut the door to give Shay some privacy to change. Grinning, Lance leaned back against the wall beside the door and closed his eyes.

“You’re looking surprisingly happy today,” Hunk said after a moment.

Lance arched an eyebrow but kept his eyes shut. If this was as close to sleep as he was going to get for the next twelve-plus hours, he wasn’t about to waste it giving Hunk the stink-eye. “What, I’m not allowed to smile?”

“That’s not what I meant. I just—you’ve been--”

“I know,” Lance said, before Hunk got too worked up. “Thanks for worrying about me, but… I think I’m gonna be okay now.”

“Yeah?”

Lance smiled a little wider, and let the silence stretch. He’d pulled all-nighters before, mostly when he’d procrastinated too long on a big project at the Garrison, but it never seemed to get easier. Now that he wasn’t focused on sewing, it was starting to hit him.

That was fine. He’d get a second wind (well, _third_ wind) soon enough, and that should get him through the rest of what he had to do today.

Hunk prodded him in the side, and Lance cracked his eyes. “What?”

“Did you get _any_ sleep last night?” Hunk asked, frowning.

“Nope.” Lance popped the _p_ , snickering as a furrow dug in between Hunk’s eyebrows. Lance reached up to smooth it out. “Calm down, big guy. I had stuff to do, but now it’s done, and I feel _great_.”

“Really?” Hunk swatted Lance’s hand away, but at least now he looked more confused than concerned. “Aren’t you the one who said you don’t feel human in the morning until you’ve taken a shower, washed your face, and had at least three cups of coffee?”

Lance shrugged. “Don’t apply if I didn't sleep. Oh, look! There’s Shay!” He turned, not giving Hunk a chance to pry further, and beamed at Shay. The first tunic he’d made her had been a little bit off, so it didn’t sit quite right on her shoulders. Lance was happy to see that the tweaks he’d made to this pattern had corrected the fit. “You look like the cover of a magazine,” he said, gesturing for her to spin.

“A what?” she asked, but spun around obediently. Lance had left the skirt loose, and it swished around her thighs as she twirled. Lance nodded in satisfaction, then snuck a glance at Hunk, who was slightly flushed, his eyes riveted on Shay.

When she stopped, she was grinning, and Lance felt a little thrill of pleasure at her expression. _Focus on the good_ , he reminded himself. Selfish? Maybe. But the war wasn’t going away, and Lance wasn’t bowing out, not as long as his friends still fought.

He was allowed to take pride in creating things, in making Shay smile—wasn’t he?

He turned, a spring in his step as he headed off toward the elevator. “Well I’m starving. Who wants some goo?”

* * *

The rest of the castle must have still been asleep—or, more likely in some cases, were up even earlier than the buttcrack of space dawn—because the kitchen and dining room were empty when Lance got there with Hunk and Shay. They served themselves bowls full of food goo and some seeds they’d found on a trade world. When they were mixed together, it made a passable imitation oatmeal.

Pidge wandered in as Lance was sitting down, and they trudged over to the goo dispensers, rubbing their eyes. Their hair stuck up at odd angles in a way that only Holt hair could manage. Lance would have ribbed them for it, but he knew his own hair was in desperate need of a comb. It had been more than six weeks since his last haircut, and it was getting a little bit unruly, even without an eight-hour sewing-and-thinking marathon.

He did his best to flatten it, and resisted the urge to return to his room for a shower. He needed to get on with things before he lost his nerve.

“Hey, Pidge,” Hunk said brightly, stirring a handful of dried alien fruit into his green alien oatmeal.

Pidge grunted and plopped down beside him, blinking at Shay a few times before their eyes cleared. “New dress?” they asked through a yawn. “Looks nice.”

Shay flushed. “Thank you. And yes. Lance made it for me.”

“Nice. Pass the kumquat?”

“It’s not kumquat, Pidge,” Hunk said, but slid the dried fruit over anyway. Pidge had a habit of renaming things around the castle in an ongoing game of free association. This particular fruit—orange and slightly dusty-looking lumps the length of Lance’s thumbs—apparently looked to Pidge like kumquats. (Lance couldn’t comment on the accuracy of the name, as he’d never _had_ a real kumquat.) The seeds in the oatmeal ( _rotan_ _a_ _ded_ _e_ _ra_ , according to Coran) were rhododendrons, and the creamy pink beverage Pidge found the most tolerable was orange juice for some reason no one could quite figure out, except maybe Matt, but he just smirked and shook his head whenever anyone tried to pry an answer out of him.

But convincing Pidge to use the correct term for anything not directly related to computers was a losing battle at the best of times—more so when Pidge was half asleep and could barely string three words together.

Lance’s eyes kept darting toward the door as he ate, an involuntary impulse he didn’t even notice until he caught Hunk staring at him, his eyebrows disappearing under his headband.

“Waiting for someone?” Hunk asked, and something in his tone made Lance think of the way he’d been avoiding Keith these last few weeks.

He flushed, hunching over his breakfast. “No,” he said. Then he straightened up, flashing a smile. “So, any plans for the day?”

Hunk and Pidge looked at him like he’d sprung up and started to dance the mambo. They glanced at each other, and a whole conversation took place in the span of two seconds.

“Well, we’ve still got a planet to save,” Pidge said dryly, leaning their cheek on their fist and spooning another lump of kumquat-and-rhododendron oatmeal into their mouth. “So I’m gonna go with that.”

Lance rolled his eyes. “That’ll take, like, five minutes. What _else_ are you doing?”

“Sleeping,” Pidge said.

Hunk laughed as Lance let out a groan. “I’ve actually got some ideas for buffing up Yellow’s shields, so I’ll probably be down with her all day.”

 _Again,_ Lance thought. When  _wasn't_ Hunk down in the hangar? But Lance just smiled politely and glanced at Shay, who seemed surprised to be included in the interrogation.

“Oh,” she said. “Um. I had planned to examine Matt again today.” Pidge lifted their head, curiosity plain on their face, and Shay traced a pattern on the tabletop. “It has been a week since last I drew out the crystals. I wanted to see whether those that remain have grown.”

“Makes sense,” Lance said. He wolfed down the last of his food, then pushed his seat back and dumped the empty bowl in the automatic washer. “Well, since you guys are all busy, I’m gonna head out. Oh.” He grabbed the door frame as he passed through and swung around, pointing over his shoulder at Pidge. “I finished your hoodie. Don’t let me forget to grab it for you later.”

Pidge’s brow furrowed. “Uh… sure, Lance.”

He was out of the dining room before they could ask what _his_ plans were. That was good. Great, even. He’d rather they all not know what he was up to. Not until it was over. This wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted an audience for—all he’d really wanted was to make sure the others wouldn’t be around to stumble into what was sure to be an awkward conversation anyway.

Lance had to scour most of the castle to find Coran, but he was in luck: the man wasn’t up on the bridge with Allura yet. Lance had deliberately avoided the bridge, along with the training deck, where Keith was sure to be. He’d spotted Shiro and Matt cuddling in the rec room, which was as adorable as it was reassuring. As long as he knew where everyone was, he could keep this private.

“Blue!” Coran called, beaming, as Lance joined him in the prep room. The whole place was spotless, floors scrubbed, shower stalls sparkling. The scent of cleaner—not quite the lemony-fresh smell of home, but close enough to sting—filled the air. Coran had a rag tucked into his belt, and he was using another to wipe down the inside of the lockers. Everyone’s armor was laid out on towels, shining like it had just been polished.

Well, almost everyone’s armor. One set of red armor was missing, which pretty much confirmed that, yes, Keith was already training at this ungodly hour.

“What brings you up here?” Coran asked, swiping once more with his cloth before backing out of the locker. “I didn’t hear Allura call you all together for the day’s mission yet.”

“Oh, no, she hasn’t.” Lance paused, rubbing the back of his neck. “Actually, I was looking for you.”

“Me?”

Lance nodded. “Can… we talk?”

* * *

“You were a soldier, right?”

Coran had to admit, that wasn’t the question he’d expected. He set his cleaning cloth on the bench beside him before turning toward Lance. The bags under the boy’s eyes had only grown darker over the last two weeks, and his hair was mussed, his clothes rumpled.

Despite all this, he seemed more at peace than he had since the last time he and Coran had talked. Somber, yes, but not on the verge of tears.

“Yes,” Coran said. “I was. Joined up when I was about your age. Well, your developmental level, anyway. I was hardly out of the nursery at your age!”

Lance blinked, and his eyes found Coran’s, silent questions burning within. But all he asked was, “What was it like? The army, I mean.”

That was a big, complicated question with a big, complicated answer, and Coran sighed, wondering where to begin. From the way Lance pursed his lips after asking the question, his gaze dropping to the floor as his brow furrowed, Coran suspected that wasn’t the question Lance had meant to ask.

Squaring his shoulders, Coran waved Lance toward the door. “Walk with me?”

They left the prep room, armor still scattered across the floor, cleaning cloths draped across the bench. Coran keyed in a command on his bracer to have the castle-ship’s robots tidy up after him, then led Lance deeper into the castle. As a young man freshly signed up for the Voltron Guard, Coran had found it easier to discuss difficult topics while he was moving. Lance, he suspected, was much the same.

“Alteans believe in peace first,” Coran said as they left the prep room behind. Lance kept pace beside him, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat, but he looked over as Coran spoke. “That’s what I always heard growing up. War, violence… Those were things other peoples dealt with. We had Voltron, and even then, the paladins were defenders, not true soldiers.”

“So what changed?”

“Nothing,” Coran said. “And everything. As Voltron’s reputation spread, we received more and more requests for aid. Eventually it wasn’t enough to merely react to someone else’s attack. Eventually we met challenges Voltron alone couldn’t handle. That’s when the castle-ship left Altea to travel the stars. The royal guard became the Voltron Guard—more an army than an honor guard—and I signed up.”

He could still picture Alfor’s face when Coran had told him the news. Shock, horror, something that bordered on disgust. _What would you do that for?_

Coran had been confused, and far too idealistic to grasp what Alfor had seen at a glance. _I couldn’t very well stay behind while you went off to see the universe._

Alfor's eyes had been so full of pity Coran had fidgeted and looked away. It was months before he realized what it was he’d signed up for.

“We fought, and we trained, and we saved lives. But it was a dirty job, and more than half our number left for home within the first two seasons.”

“Because of the killing?”

Coran looked over at Lance and saw the same haunted look he’d seen on the face of so many friends and comrades in his youth. The same look he’d seen in the mirror more often than he’d been willing to admit, at least until the very end of his service. He ached to reach out and comfort the boy, but there was still a wall of ice around him—melting, yes, but not yet gone.

Facing forward, Coran nodded. They reached the elevator, and Coran pressed the button for the ground floor. “Yes. When you grow up believing in peace and diplomacy, the transition to killing, even for a noble cause, is difficult.” He paused, watching the numbers on the display tick downward. “I imagine it’s a difficult transition for anyone to make.”

“But you stayed. When everyone else left to go back home, you stayed with the army, right?”

“I did.”

The door slid open.

Lance started back toward the heart of the castle, but Coran touched his arm and nodded in the other direction, toward a little-used corridor to one of the outer towers. Lance arched an eyebrow, but followed Coran without complaint.

“I stayed,” Coran said, “because King Alfor needed me. Because the other soldiers in my squad were counting on me.”

Lance huffed a feeble laugh. “Yeah, I feel you there.”

Coran made note of the pain in Lance’s voice, but he didn’t comment. “It wasn’t enough, though. This way.” He turned down a narrow passage lined with doors on each side. Lance frowned at them as they passed, obviously curious, so Coran stopped at the one marked with the number twenty-seven. “My old squad’s bunks,” he said, opening the door.

Lance peered at the double row of beds inside. Ten bunks, each with a trunk at the foot and a little display screen on the wall beside the pillow. Other soldiers had posted photos of family members there, letters from home, a favorite view of Altea.

Coran’s screen had had only a picture of him and Alfor, both small and scrawny and beaming, their fine clothes covered in mud.

“There were ten of us to start,” Coran said. “Tala and Karus didn’t have the stomach for fighting and went home. Mirana died in our very first battle. Wes and Martren followed before the year was out. After that we combined with the twenty-sixth squadron and the commanders started to accept new recruits from the worlds we visited.”

The air was thick with memories. With laughter and tears. With long, hollow nights spent staring at the ceiling and thinking of those he’d killed.

“I knew by then I wasn’t going to last in the ground forces. I stayed because I thought I owed it to my friends, but the more I fought, the more it tore me apart.” Coran paused, gauging Lance’s mood. His hand trailed along a bedpost as he walked the perimeter of the room, eyes distant and sad. “Everyone has their limits, Lance. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

Lance looked like he wanted to argue the point, but instead he just turned and left the room, shuddering as if it were the ghosts of _his_ past who haunted it.

Coran followed him out into the hallway, and they continued on the way to the memorial hall. Coran could tell Lance was working himself up to say something, so he remained silent, keeping pace beside Lance as they navigated familiar twists and turns. Coran doubted the new paladins had found their way out here yet; only the upper levels of the outer towers, where the lions’ hangars were, held any import for them. The lower levels were where the old guard had lived and trained, and now that they were empty only the cleaning bots came here.

They reached the circular corridor at the heart of the tower before Lance found his voice.

“You fight now,” he said, his voice low and hesitant, like he was afraid to offend Coran. “You talk like fighting was a mistake, but you take part in our battles now no problem.”

“Yes, well, I have a better reason now than I used to.”

“And what’s that?”

There were several ways Coran could answer that question. He was older now, better able to separate the act from the consequences, the intent from the necessity from the end result. He’d had half his life to grow desensitized to violence, and he knew now that killing was sometimes necessary to prevent a greater loss of life. He’d accepted that.

More than that, he’d accepted that there were very few people in the universe now who had both the means and the desire to fight back. If Coran didn’t fight, there was no one to take his place, and Team Voltron—already outnumbered and unprepared—would be even weaker. If Coran didn’t fight, the paladins could very easily end up dead.

But Lance didn’t need to hear that. He already bore enough weight of responsibility. To add more guilt to his shoulders would do him no good, and Coran didn’t want to be the one to knock him down now that he’d finally begun to stand with his chin up once more.

So he walked a few steps more in silence, debating his answer, then stopped just outside the door to the memorial.

“Truthfully?” he asked. “I know the harm Zarkon can do. I was his friend once, and I failed to recognize the path he chose until it was too late. I forfeited the right to stay out of this fight a long time ago.”

Lance’s brow furrowed at that, and while he was contemplating Coran’s words, Coran turned and opened the door. Inside was a large chamber, round and high-ceilinged. Crystals embedded in the walls filled the room with a dim blue glow. Memory cylinders lined the walls—smaller than the ones beneath the bridge, packed so close together you could barely see the metal behind.

The center of the room was left mostly empty, but more cylinders sprouted here and there, and smaller stone and metal memorials besides.

“What is this place?” Lance asked.

“The Second Cohort’s memorial. I often came here when I was feeling overwhelmed.” Coran crossed to the nearest cylinder and pressed his fingertips against the glass. The light within swirled, then condensed into the shape of a young girl who smiled, rocking up onto her toes. She wore a simple wrap embroidered with blue thread—quite formal attire by Teruvinian standards.

“Hi,” she said shyly. “I’m Veiria. I live in Calvaral City, on Teruvinian. I’m ten standard, and I was inside the Thaka Street bank when it was bombed.” She pulled up the hem of her dress, showing a freshly healed scar that ran the length of her leg and disappeared beneath the fabric above her knee. “Captain Artana and her troops came and rescued me.” She paused, sucking on her lip. “Mama says I’d be dead without you. Thank you for saving us.”

Veiria bowed and vanished, and an older man took her place to tell his story. The man, Harna, and his three sons had been trapped in the market in a rural village when the invading ships landed and started rounding up Teruvi peasants to send to work camps.

After Harna was Mata, a local bodyguard who had fought alongside the Altean troops. After Mata, Rhals, and after Rhals, Baurei.

Coran listened to the stories he’d heard a thousand times before, but he kept his eyes on Lance’s face.

“We helped people.” Coran gestured around the space. “Each of these memorials tells the story of a different planet. Some we saved from invaders, others from wild beasts or natural disasters. Those cylinders around the edges of the rooms? They tell the stories of our fallen allies. Not all of them were able to record memory profiles themselves, but we collected stories from anyone who knew them.”

“Think about the good you do,” Lance muttered. “Ignore the rest.” He chuckled, wandering through the memorial. His hand reached out to touch cylinder after cylinder, waking the memories within, and soon the air was filled with the voices of the dead. “Hunk said the same thing.”

“Don’t you think it’s a good idea?”

Lance paused, his touch lingering on the latest cylinder, where a facet of a Thlochtian hive told the story of their planet.

"I don't know. Hunk and Shiro, they... they both seem to have it all together, but the advice Shiro gave me was almost completely opposite what Hunk said. Face the bad things head on, Shiro said." The light of the memory core cast Lance's skin in frosty tones, dancing in his eyes like spirits.

Coran clasped his hands behind his back and strolled over to Lance, keeping his gaze on the Thlochtian in the glass cylinder. "Everyone has to find their own answer, Lance. Mine was not the same as Alfor's, and it's not the same as Allura's. Yours likely won't be quite like anyone else's."

"It just seems so _arrogant_ to say that they're wrong, though. I--" Lance took a sharp breath, blew it out, leaned his forehead on the glass. "The funny thing is I'm pretty sure I _know_ what I need to do, but it feels like I'm saying Hunk and Shiro's ways aren't good enough. Which, I mean, come on. When it comes to coping and doing the right thing and-and-" Lance's knuckles knocked against the glass weakly, like he wanted to punch something but ran out of steam halfway in. "And this whole thing with Keith. Hunk and Shiro accepted him from the very beginning. How can I pretend I know better than them in _any_ of it?"

Coran's brow furrowed as he tried to figure out where, exactly, Keith factored into all of this. He didn't ask, though. Not quite yet.

Instead, he stepped back. "There's no value judgement on coping with war." He made a soothing noise as Lance started to protest. "How about you start by telling me about this answer you've found for yourself."

Lance was silent a moment longer, his breath misting on the glass. Then his fist loosened, and he patted the cylinder twice and straightened, squaring his shoulders. "Well, first of all, I know I'm not strong like Shiro."

 _Debatable_ , Coran thought.

Lance flailed his hands toward the Thlochtian's cylinder. "So just straight-up facing it all and learning to be okay with what we have to do? That's not happening. I wish. But I-I don't think I could do what Hunk does, either. I'm happy it works for him, counting, measuring the good against the bad, but I don’t want to just be able to say that I did more good than harm. A lot of people can say that. Hell, _most_ people can, as long as they’re allowed to define for themself what it means to _do good_.”

"Then… what _do_ you want?”

“I want to be able to say I’m doing the right thing. To  _know_ it. I want to know that I’m not--” He shook his head, hunched his shoulders, and fell silent. “Sorry,” he said, stilted. His mouth opened, like he was going to continue, then he turned and abruptly headed for the door. “It’s stupid.”

“I’m sure it’s not.” Coran followed, reaching a hand out to clasp Lance's shoulder. They stopped just inside the door, the last few memory voices whispering around them. “What is it you want, Lance?”

Lance stared at the ground for a long time, then looked up at Coran. “What about the Galra?”

Startled, all Coran could do was blink. “What about them?”

“Everyone takes care of their own—even Zarkon, kind of. A lot of people will look out for people who are obviously victims, too, but… what about the ones who don’t look like victims? What about the people like Keith? What about the ones who would join us if they had the chance? If we kill them right along with all the other Galra, if we decide it’s our right to just wipe out an entire species because they’re ‘the enemy,’ if we _murder_ them without even giving them the chance to choose peace, then how are we any better than Zarkon?”

Lance’s voice had risen steadily as he spoke, and his last words reverberated through the sudden silence left in the wake of the memories’ voices. His eyes were glassy and bright, his trembling hands spread wide as if to encompass all the memories that had been left in this room.

Coran gaped at him, aching with the sudden understanding--and recognition. This was the sort of thing Coran was used to hearing from Lealle. To hear it from Lance hit Coran with a wave of mingled grief and pride that left him breathless. “Is _that_ what’s been bothering you all this time?”

Flushing, Lance dropped his gaze and wrapped his arms around himself. "I told you it was stupid."

“Oh, Lance.” Coran closed the distance between them in a single step and wrapped his arms around Lance, one hand resting on the back of his head. Lance tensed for only a moment before he let out a sigh and sank into the embrace. “The fact that you can even think to ask that question is what proves you’ll never be as bad as Zarkon. Not even close.”

“But look at how many people we’ve killed.” Lance’s voice shook. “Look at all the people we killed, and we never even gave them a _chance_.”

Coran clasped Lance’s shoulders and held him at arm’s length, meeting his eyes steadily. “You didn’t have a choice.”

"Yeah? Well maybe they didn't get a choice, either," Lance said. "Maybe they didn't want to fight. Maybe they're just trying to survive, same as us."

"Maybe." Coran's shoulders slumped. "But even then, it's not _your_ fault. Zarkon is the one who started this war. He's the one who makes it so that the only choice is between one life and another."

Lance nodded. He didn't seem fully convinced, but he managed a smile as he pulled away. They walked in silence out of the memorial hall, back through the old Voltron Guard barracks, toward the heart of the castle.

It was only on the elevator that Lance found his voice. "Anyway, I guess that's my answer. I can't just ignore the killing, but I can't accept it, either. I have to know that each choice I make is the right one. I don't... I don't know if that's something I _can_ do, but I have to try."

"And I'll be here for you," Coran said. "We all will be, if you'll let us help."

Lance nodded. "Thanks." He leaned his head back against the wall. "I just... I want to prove that Blue didn't make a mistake." Color crept into Lance's cheeks as Coran turned toward him. "I know she probably only chose me because she needed someone to get her off Earth, to get all the others out here so they could find their lions, but... I want to be worthy of her."

Coran smiled, eyes watering. "The lions never choose out of convenience, Lance. Blue waited ten thousand years for you. Ten thousand years, and she never found anyone else as worthy as you."

Lance stilled, his breath rattling to a halt. It hitched once, and a tear slipped past his walls, tracing a path down his cheek, over the tense angle of his jaw, and into the hollow at the base of his neck. "Coran..."

The elevator doors opened with a chime.

Flushing, Lance wiped his eyes and hurried out into the corridor. He was halfway down the corridor before he slowed, recognition flashing across his face.

“The training deck?” he asked.

Coran nodded calmly, striding past Lance and leading him around the long, gently sloping corridor that led into the control booth. The room was dark, only a few lights glowing at the controls. Keith danced across the floor below them, sword snapping as he dueled the gladiator.

Lance took a faltering step toward the glass—opaque at the moment, so Keith wouldn’t see them even if he happened to look up. The rhythm of Lance’s breath quickened, and he made a noise like he wanted to speak, but no words came out.

Coran stepped up beside him.

“War is an awful, ugly thing,” Coran said. “But Voltron is about more than just war.”

“I don’t hate him.” The words tumbled out of Lance in a rush, and he cringed, shooting a self-conscious look at Coran, who smiled.

“I know you don’t.”

Lance turned back to the window as Keith took a hit to the chest and flew back. He landed on his feet and raised his sword an instant before the gladiator’s next blow landed.

“I haven’t been very fair to him,” Lance whispered.

Coran hummed and patted Lance’s arm. “I’m afraid not.” He paused, watching Lance as Lance watched Keith. “I’m not here to tell you what to do, Lance, but—”

“No.” Lance stood up a little taller, smiling wanly. “I'm the blue paladin, aren't I? Trust and love and all that hippie crap, right? I know what I need to do." He turned. "Could you do me a favor?”

“Of course. Just say the word.”

* * *

Matt let out a sigh as Shay worked her magic. Her hands were warm against his bare back, easing the knot that had been growing between his shoulder blades since yesterday. He lay facedown on the bed in the infirmary, his arms folded beneath his head, melting into the mattress a little more with each passing minute.

“I guess it’s not hurting as much as it did the first time?” Shiro asked, a smile in his voice.

“Mm.” Matt turned his head, giving Shiro a sleepy smile. It had been hard—harder than Matt wanted to admit—to pull himself off the couch where he and Shiro had been talking (more  _kissing_ than talking, if he was being honest) up until ten minutes ago. “Shay takes care of me.”

Shay giggled, sliding her palms outward toward Matt’s shoulders. The warmth moved with her, loosening new muscles. He could still feel the crystals shifting within him, a queasy sort of sensation that left him with an acute case of vertigo. But it was definitely better than that first day on the Balmera. Lying down helped with the dizziness, his body had adapted somewhat to the process, and Shay had already removed or fragmented the largest crystals.

Mostly, though, he thought the improvement came from Shay’s own skills. She remembered what techniques had the lowest impact and stuck to those whenever possible.

“Arms out,” she said now, tapping his elbow. Matt obediently shifted so Shay had easy access to his arms—the last stop on today’s tour of the human crystal-sack. She’d started with his legs, taking special care to massage his left knee after she’d finished her work. It still ached a little, but it was a good sort of ache, the kind that told him he was healing, not that he’d hurt himself worse.

She'd let him put his jeans back on after that, and draped a blanket over his lower half. Shiro’s hand rested on his ankle, a warm and comforting weight.

“So,” Matt said, turning his head to watch Shay work her way from his shoulder to his wrist. He took a slow breath to keep from crying out as she extracted a particularly large crystal from his bicep (an unnerving process to watch—skin stretching outward for an instant before it split and gave birth to something shiny and angular.) Shay grabbed the Altean version of an alcohol wipe—less painful, but even colder than what Matt remembered from home—to clean the wound, then dabbed a little wound glue over the cut to seal it.

When she moved on, Matt tried his question again.

“So it’s been a couple of weeks now,” he said to Shay. “How are you liking the castle?”

“Oh, it is lovely.” Shay wrapped her hands around his elbow, closing her eyes in concentration. “Quiet, but that is welcome at times. I am grateful that you all have been so kind to me.”

“Of course,” Shiro said. “We’re happy to have you.”

Matt smiled, flinching only a little as another crystal emerged. This one was small, hardly as thick as pencil lead, and Shay didn’t bother with the wound glue. “Honestly, I don’t know why you stick around. A masseuse like you could probably make a fortune on a resort planet somewhere.”

Shay’s laugh was shy and sweet, and her touch on Matt’s arm grew warmer—literally. Shay’s thick skin didn’t show a blush, but he’d noticed that her body temperature, or maybe just the temperature of her Quintessence, changed with her mood.

He smiled as she moved on to his other arm.

“Thank you,” she said. “But I could not leave. Where would I go? Few worlds in the Empire are safe—and I could never leave you all behind, knowing what it is you do.”

“Lucky for me,” Matt said, careful to keep his voice light. “And lucky for Hunk.”

Suddenly Shay’s hand on his arm felt like fire, and Matt gave her a wide grin.

“Don’t worry,” he said with a wink. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

Shiro smacked his foot, not hard enough to hurt. “Matt...”

Matt turned his head back the other way and arched an eyebrow in Shiro’s direction. “Don’t _Matt_ me.”

With a long-suffering sigh, Shiro lifted his gaze toward Shay. “I’m sorry for my boyfriend. He can be a little bit rude.”

“I think you mean _charming and witty_.”

“More like smarmy and shitty.”

One of Shay’s hands left Matt’s skin as she attempted to stifle her laughter, and Matt gave Shiro a self-satisfied smirk. “You two bicker like my parents,” she said, which wiped the smirk of Matt’s face and left him flushed, keenly aware that he had no shirt on to hide the blush creeping up his neck.

Shiro’s eyes twinkled. “Hear that, Matty? We’re already an old married couple, and we’ve barely known each other three years.”

“We're too young and beautiful to be an old married couple,” Matt wailed, though new warmth was spreading outward from the place where Shiro’s hand still rested. Shiro had leaned forward, resting his other elbow on the bed and dropping his chin into it to smile at Matt. He was just close enough for Matt to reach down and ruffle the shock of white hair that always seemed to get in his eyes. “Guess it’s too late, though. Your hair’s going gray, I’ve got the arthritis of a seventy-five-year old...” He sighed dramatically. “You know, back in my day the Galra knew how to respect weekends and holidays.”

Shiro snorted, then caught Matt’s hand and kissed his knuckles. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And you’re one sweater vest away from retirement.” Matt tilted his chin up so he could almost see Shay behind him. “You agree with me on this one, don’t you, Shay?”

“I agree that you are both wonderful people, and that you make each other very happy,” she said carefully. “And I agree with my brother Rax. It is best not to insert yourself into a lover’s quarrel.” She patted his hand twice, then withdrew. “It is finished.”

Matt sat up, feeling like he’d just been de-boned. His muscles were syrupy-slack, and he couldn’t keep from yawning as he took the shirt Shiro passed back to him and slipped into it.

“So, doc, what’s the prognosis?” he asked as Shay threw away the spent alcohol wipes and washed her hands.

"They are still growing,” Shay said. “Not so quickly I cannot keep up, but...”

“But it’s not stopping,” Matt said, his good mood somewhat punctured by the news.

Shay nodded. “It is inevitable, I suppose. The castle was built to support many more than we nine beings, so there is an excess of Quintessence in the air. Your body absorbs some of that, and the crystals respond.”

Shiro frowned, carefully folding the blanket as Matt pulled on his shoes--Altean shoes, form-fitting and surprisingly comfortable. “No ideas yet on a permanent solution?”

“I am afraid not.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Matt said. “I’m sure we’ll come up with something once Pidge is done with the research logs.” He tried not to let his unease show on his face. He’d agreed to let Pidge look through the files only reluctantly, and only because it was the best shot at finding a cure. He was acutely aware that Pidge was more likely to find details about Matt’s imprisonment that were better left buried than anything tangibly helpful.

Shay dried her hands on a towel, smiling wanly. “Let us hope so. And do not hesitate to find me should the crystals bother you again.”

“Right.” Matt pulled on the black-and-red fleece jacket Lance had made him after realizing that Matt was almost always cold in the castle. (Coran assured him that the castle automatically adjusted to the ideal ambient temperature for its residents. Matt thought that was a load of bull.) “Well. Shall we?”

He held out his hand to Shiro, who took it with a small smile, waved to Shay, and headed out the door. They walked in comfortable silence to the elevator, where Shiro pushed the button for the bridge.

Matt frowned, and jabbed the button for the fifth floor, where the rec room was.

Shiro arched an eyebrow at him. “Matt, you know we have actual work to do today, right?”

“Not yet we don’t.”

“Allura’s going to call us all together eventually.”

The doors opened on the fifth floor, and Matt dragged Shiro out into the hallway. “And when she does, we’ll go up to the bridge like the mature, responsible adults we are.”

Shiro’s lips twitched.

“What?”

“Nothing.” Shiro’s lips twitched again. “I’m just having a hard time thinking of you as mature, responsible, _or_ an adult.”

Matt’s mouth dropped open with a squawk of protest, and Shiro finally lost his hold on a straight face. He burst out laughing as Matt tackled him around the middle—probably not the best strategy, considering Shiro was built like Superman and barely even swayed at Matt’s best attempts to move him.

Huffing, Matt waddled backward, swatting at the wall until he found the access panel for the rec room door. Once inside, Matt pivoted, and Shiro allowed himself to be swung around. It was like dancing, almost. Very awkward, very poorly-choreographed dancing.

Matt’s foot hit the couch and he flopped backwards onto it, pulling Shiro down on top of him. The landing squeezed the air from Matt's lungs, but Shiro's weight was warm and familiar against Matt’s chest, and he instinctively tightened his arms when Shiro moved to pull away.

Shiro stilled, staring down at Matt with a fond smile on his face that made the whole room just a little bit brighter.

“Stay?” Matt asked.

Shiro kissed him. "Only because you asked so nicely," he said, then made himself comfortable on the couch atop Matt. Matt closed his eyes, reveling in Shiro's proximity and letting all the rest fade to gray. In moments, the beat of Shiro’s heartbeat against Matt's chest had lulled him to sleep.

* * *

Keith grunted as he blocked the gladiator’s strike. It was set to level four, and it wielded a sword instead of a staff. This was the highest difficulty Keith could handle on his own; higher, probably, than he should have been facing without someone there to spot him.

But Keith had been training on his own for a long time. Alone against the Galra training bots was just about the only way he could challenge himself back inside the empire. The Altean gladiator had different movesets programmed in, which had set Keith back somewhat, but he’d faced more difficult than this before. For a Galra, training wasn’t training until your life was in danger.

The one hazard he hadn’t anticipated was the sight of Lance walking into the room. He wore his blue paladin armor, but his helmet was held loosely at his side, and his eyes were fixed squarely on Keith.

In his shock, Keith’s steps slowed, and the gladiator slid into the lapse.

Keith hit the ground five feet away, and his sword slid several feet more. Pain like a dagger throbbed in his side where the Gladiator had struck.

“End training sequence!”

Keith’s voice echoed Lance’s, and maybe it was Keith’s imagination, but he thought he heard a note of urgency to the other paladin’s voice that had never been there before.

“Shit. Keith, are you all right?”

Halfway through pushing himself to his feet, Keith spotted Lance’s outstretched hand. He took it purely out of habit, dumbstruck as Lance hauled him upright. It was only when Keith had stepped back to check his armor for cracks or blood (none, thankfully) that he realized this was the first time Lance had willingly come so close since threatening him on Berlou.

Narrowing his eyes, Keith looked up at Lance and waited for… what? A fight? An accusation?

But all Lance did was scratch the back of his head and stare at the inert gladiator. “Can… we talk?”

Keith kept his expression neutral.

“Sure,” he said slowly, pulling off his helmet. He hesitated for a moment, his fingers dancing on the underside of his visor, then stalked off toward the hatch on the wall where the water pouches were stored. He dropped his helmet beneath the cabinet, poked the straw into a pouch, then turned and raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead. Talk.”

Lance cringed, but followed Keith over and dropped his helmet beside Keith’s. He leaned against the wall a few feet away, facing Keith. Their eyes locked—another first, Keith thought, in the instant before Lance’s gaze got to be too much and Keith averted his own.

“I’m sorry.”

Keith’s eyes snapped back to Lance. Not his eyes, not quite, but his face. The stubborn set of his jaw, the lip caught between his teeth, the hand rubbing the back of his neck.

“For _what?_ ”

The words popped out of Keith’s mouth before he processed what he was saying, or how. The question sounded hostile, and willfully ignorant.

If he was expecting Lance to snap back at him, however, he was to be disappointed. Lance rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, twisted his face up into something tense and sour, and said, “For everything. For being an ass. For...” He waved his hands at Keith, who frowned.

“For… me?”

“For how I’ve been treating you,” Lance said. “You didn’t deserve any of my shit, and I’m sorry it went on so long. You’re a paladin as much as any of us. You’re part of this team. I’m sorry for acting like you weren’t.”

Keith blinked. “Oh.”

He should say something. Shouldn’t he say something? People usually said something in response to an apology, right? But _I forgive you_ seemed trite and _It’s fine_ was a bald-faced lie. It _wasn’t_ fine, none of it. The accusations, the hostility, the cold shoulder. Even while Keith understood where Lance was coming from, it still stung, and he wasn’t going to sweep it under the rug. But, honestly, an apology from Lance was the last thing Keith had expected today. He had no words prepared.

So he just stared, brow furrowed, mouth open until he caught himself and shut it.

Lance groaned, rubbing his hands down his face. “Ugh. I’m no good at this.” He sighed, shook his head, and put his hands on his hips. “Look, I know that one little apology is, like, nothing, so I don’t expect you to just… I dunno. Shake my hand and move on with your life. If you want me to go, I’ll go.” He hesitated, then pushed on. “But I want to fix this—I want to at least start. If you’re up for it, we could maybe try some team building?”

Keith narrowed his eyes. The last time they’d tried team building, the last _dozen_ times, it had ended with Lance stalking off, shaking with fury and unable to even look Keith’s way.

No thanks.

But Lance was trying. No one would be more surprised to hear that than Keith was, but it was the truth. Lance was here, hackles down, a timid smile on his face, asking for a chance. Didn’t Keith owe him—owe all the paladins—one honest try?

He was going to regret this.

“Fine,” he said. Then, when he failed to come up with either an explanation for himself or a warning for Lance, he said it again. “ _Fine_.”

More surprising even than the apology was the way Lance’s smile brightened at Keith’s words.

“Great! Uh. Great.” Lance stooped to pick up his helmet, tossed it from hand to hand, then jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Why don’t you head up to the control booth?”

Keith frowned at that. There weren’t many exercises that put one of them in the booth—and of them all, Keith could think of none where Lance wouldn’t insist on being the one safe behind the glass. But, fine. Keith would at least see where this was going before he put up a fuss. He picked up his helmet, downed the last of his water, and tossed the empty pouch in the garbage chute on his way out the door.

He’d only been up in the control booth twice, and it felt strange to take the ramp up now, on his own, voluntarily engaging in team building with Lance—with no Allura or Shiro around to referee. There was no way this was going to end well.

Coran was waiting in the control booth when Keith arrived. After so many surprises in such quick succession, Keith didn’t have the energy to get excited over just one more. His steps slowed for just a moment, then he nodded to Coran and joined him by the controls.

“All set up there?” Lance asked.

Coran flipped a switch that removed the tint from the windows, then flashed Lance a thumbs-up. “Just about ready. Give us a tick.”

He gestured to Keith to take a seat, and Keith did so, still frowning. “Do you have any idea what sort of team building we’re supposed to be doing?”

“Of course.” Coran pressed a button, and a labyrinth flickered into view on the floor below before slowly fading from view. “Invisible maze,” Coran said, entirely too chipper. “You remember how this one goes?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, heart sinking. “I try to give Lance directions to the exit and he yells at me for leading him into walls when he’s just _not listening_.”

“I can hear you, Mullet,” Lance grumbled.

Keith shot Coran a scowl. “Mullet?” That was a new one.

Ignoring them both, Coran pressed a different button on the control panel, and a gladiator dropped into the maze somewhere between Lance and the exit.

“What the hell is _that_?” Keith yelped.

“Advanced mode!” Coran tapped a few buttons, smiling to himself. “That’s a level five gladiator, by the by, so it might be best to lead Lance _away_. Those things are hard enough to beat without the electric walls.”

“No kidding.” Keith glared down at Lance, who was still smiling, though his eyes kept darting to the gladiator. “Are you _trying_ to make me kill you?”

Lance fluttered a hand in Keith’s direction. “Pssh. This is nothing.”

“We haven’t even come close to beating the maze on _normal_ mode,” Keith pointed out. He turned to Coran, slightly frantic. “I’m not doing this.”

“Keith,” Lance said, surprisingly serious. “My man. Relax. You’ve got this.” He paused, then looked up. They were too far away to lock eyes, precisely, but Keith had the same jittery, too-much feeling of eye contact from the smile Lance flashed his way. “I trust you.”

The statement, simple though it was, startled Keith into silence for a long moment. When he spoke again, it was without much heat. “You’re going to get hurt.”

“Eh.” Lance shrugged, spreading his hands wide. His fingers brushed the nearby wall and he yelped, shaking out his hand. “Fair’s fair.”

Coran tapped Keith on the shoulder, then pointed to where the gladiator had begun to make its way through the maze. “No time to argue,” Coran said. “Best get moving, eh?”

Keith’s pulse quickened, and for a moment he forgot how to speak. He’d done the invisible maze often enough—mostly with Shiro—but almost always from the other side of the glass. Keith was good with following instructions, with shutting off the part of his brain that thought about the invisible walls and whether he was about to run into one.

He wasn’t as good at talking other people through them.

Licking his lips, Keith scanned the display in front of him, trying to plot out a course to the exit. “Okay, turn left, take two steps forward, then turn right and take three more steps.”

He glanced up as Lance nodded and started walking. Keith realized too late he’d still been measuring distance in Shiro’s longer strides; Lance, with his shorter legs and more tentative pace, clipped the corner of the maze and yelped, backing quickly away.

Keith bit his tongue, his breath stopping in his chest. _Vrekt._ Well, _this_ was off to a great start. Two seconds, and he’d already run Lance into a wall. He braced himself for a fight, like every other time he’d given Lance bad directions.

It didn’t come.

Lance breathed in, rubbed his elbow, and forced a laugh. “Let’s just say that was payback for almost shooting you the first time we met.”

Keith started breathing again.

He stared at the map in silence, words hovering just beyond his grasp. He wanted to apologize, wanted to explain himself, but his throat was thick and his voice seemed too heavy to stir into motion.

“Keith?” Lance asked. “Buddy?”

Keith focused on breathing. Coran put a hand on his shoulder, but Keith squirmed away from the touch. The world was already on overdrive, his armor too heavy on his shoulders, the seat hard and uncomfortable beneath him. His own breathing echoed in his ears like an engine, and the lights on other monitors poked at the corners of his vision like tiny laser blasts.

One the ground below, the gladiator inched closer to Lance.

Closing his eyes, Keith took a deep breath. _Push through this. You can’t choke now._ He dug his claws into his palms, the sharp pain grounding him, then opened his eyes and tried again.

“One more small step to your left,” he said, voice clipped. Angry. He didn’t mean to be angry, but talking at all was hard enough right now. Regulating his tone? Beyond him entirely. He hoped Lance didn’t take it personally. “Okay, now turn right. Three steps forward. One more.”

Keith kept his directions short, waiting for Lance to complete each move before moving on to the next. It was slow, slower than the gladiator, but Keith didn’t want to risk another brush with the wall.

“You’re drifting too far to the left,” Keith said. “Come back a little to your right. No, wait--”

Keith winced as Lance over-corrected and brushed the right-hand wall.

Lance’s laugh was a little higher-pitched this time, and it took him a moment longer to shake it off. “That one’s for letting the drone hit you in combat training.”

“Are you finally admitting that was intentional?” Keith asked. He meant it as a joke, but his voice was still strained, and Lance cringed.

“Uh… I plead the fifth.”

“The what?”

Coran cleared his throat. “Not to put any more pressure on you, but, ah, you _might_ want to pick up the pace _just_ a bit.”

Keith checked the gladiator’s position and tried not to swear. “Right. I think I’ve got your stride length down now.” _I hope._ “Turn left, take three steps forward, then turn right, two more steps, turn forty-five degrees more to the right, and take six steps.”

Lance lifted his foot, hesitated, then put it back down. “Uh, sorry. One more time?”

“Left, three steps. Right, two steps. Forty-five degrees right, six steps.”

“Okay. Uh, left.” He turned left. “Two—no, three steps. Forty-five degrees--”

“Not yet,” Keith said quickly, before Lance could walk himself face-first into another wall. “Regular right turn, two steps forward, _then_ forty-five degrees.”

Lance nodded, and turned. “Sorry, sorry. I just—sorry. Lists are—bad. I’m bad, I mean, with lists.”

“ _Lance_ ,” Keith cried. “Turn right—no, not—I meant forty-five— _vrekt_.”

Lance hit the wall, staggered back, and hit the corner behind him. He gasped, doubling over, and Keith felt sympathetic pain shoot through him. He felt sick.

“ _Vrekt_ ,” Keith hissed. There was a rushing in his ears, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the laser-bright glow of indicator lights across the console. “ _Vrekt._ ” Everything was going wrong. _Team building._ Right. Even when they were both trying it all went to shit. “I’m sorry, Lance, I’m not good with...” He gave a weak gesture with hands that didn’t want to give up their death-grip on the edge of the table. “I’m not good with this. Directions. _Words_. _Vrekt._ ”

After a moment of silence, Lance started giggling.

Keith stared down at him, slack-jawed. “What are you— _Why_ are you laughing?”

“Nothing!” Lance raised a hand, wheezing. He wasn’t doing a very good job of keeping the giggles at bay, but he gave it an honest effort. “Sorry. Nothing. Not you. Well. You but also me. This.” With one more giddy outburst, he straightened, biting his lips. It kept the giggles in, but he was still grinning. “You’re bad at giving directions, I’m even worse with following them… I don’t think I thought this through very well.”

“No, you didn’t,” Keith said. He focused on just breathing for a moment, until he managed to uncurl his hands, until words were a little easier to come by. “We can stop now, if you want. Before you zap yourself into a healing pod. You’ve proved your point.”

But Lance shook his head. “No way, _Keith_. I don’t back down from a challenge. We’re doing this.” He paused, shifting his weight to one side and putting a hand on his hip. “Unless you’re _scared_.”

“You _wish_.”

Lance grinned. “Perfect. Lead on, Red.”

Keith had the next six moves stacked up in his head before he thought better of it. _I’m bad with lists,_ Lance had said. And now that Keith thought of it, that was what usually tripped Lance up in the maze—long sequences of turns and step counts. He had a tendency to skip a step, or switch the order of two in the middle.

“Let’s try something different,” Keith said. “Turn just a little bit to the right. Good.” Keith glanced at the gladiator’s position. They’d have to be fast, but they might make it. “Okay, now start walking forward. Small steps, but keep a steady pace. When I say left or right, you turn that direction. Don’t stop walking unless I tell you to.”

Lance nodded and started walking. Keith tracked his progress, shooting occasional glances at the gladiator. He guided Lance through the turns as they came, and Lance obeyed quickly and without question. He looked a little nervous when the passages brought him close to the gladiator--but he never slowed.

As they progressed, Keith forgot about the tightness in his chest, the rushing in his ears, the lights in the control booth. He relaxed into the exercise, sitting forward in anticipation as Lance neared the gladiator.

“It’s gonna be close,” Keith said. “Pick up the pace just a little bit. Left.”

Lance turned, his steps coming quicker now. He glanced at the gladiator almost as often as Keith did, though Lance couldn’t see the intersection where, if they were lucky, Lance would pass through just before the gladiator arrived. It had been watching Lance the whole time, though it obviously had the maze programmed into it. _It_ hadn't hit the wall once.

Now that they were close, it seemed more restless than before, one metal finger tapping at the hilt of its sword. It quickened its pace.

“Left,” Keith barked. “Faster, Lance. Right.”

Lance and the gladiator raced toward the intersection, Lance only ahead by a narrow margin. The gladiator reached the connecting passage and turned toward Lance, who froze, sucking in a breath.

Keith shot to his feet, clenching the microphone so tightly it was a miracle it didn’t shatter. “ _Lance_!” he roared. “ _Move_.”

Lance took off at a near run, and Keith hurriedly returned his gaze to the map.

“Right!”

Lance turned right. The gladiator behind him swung, and sparks leaped from the place where its sword met the wall.

“Right!” Keith shouted.

The gladiator swung again, and Lance yelped, ducking to cover his head even as he broke into a dead sprint. Keith scrambled to keep up with the turns—“ _Left!_ ”--as Lance skidded around corners and bounced off walls, squawking in pain but not daring to slow as the gladiator behind him kept up its merciless advance.

“You’re almost there,” Keith said. “Right! Left! Now _run_!”

Lance ran, not slowing even when he cleared the edge of the maze. The walls behind him sizzled and disappeared. The gladiator stopped in its tracks, its eye going dark. Keith’s display flickered and disappeared as he slumped backward into his chair.

Down below, Lance held out his arms to catch himself on the far wall, gasping for air. A laugh bubbled up out of him, hiccuping and heady. He tore off his helmet and pressed a hand to his face, a wide grin growing beneath flushed cheeks.

“Holy shit, we actually _did_ it.” Lance laughed again, then flopped backwards onto the ground with a whoop of delight, fists pumping in the air over his prone body. “Yeah! Take _that_ you frickin’ maze!”

He tipped his head back and gave Keith a blinding grin.

“Not bad, fuzzbutt.”

The laughter snuck up on Keith, one final surprise in a morning full of the unexpected. He leaned his head back against the seat and gave into the wild, cathartic mirth, sweeping sweaty hair off his face. “Not bad yourself,” he said, breathless. “But next time _you’re_ giving the directions.”

Lance went still. “Next time?”

“Uh.” Keith’s smile faded. “Sorry.”

“Nope. No sorrys.” Lance raised a hand in a thumbs-up, realized he was looking at Keith upside down, and flipped the gesture right-side up from Keith’s perspective. “Next time you’re the one getting shocked; that sounds good to me. I bet you look really fluffy when all that fur stands on end.”

Keith only laughed in response.

“Very impressive, both of you,” Coran said. Keith gave a start, heat creeping into his face. He’d completely forgotten about the Altean’s presence—and from Coran’s smothered laughter, he knew it. “It’s not going to break any records, but a very impressive showing all the same.”

“Hold on, _records_?” Lance rolled over and staggered upright, looking a little woozy. “There are _rankings_ on this thing?”

“Certainly. Keith and Shiro hold the top spot. Matt and Pidge are in second.”

Lance turned a horrified gape on Keith. “You went and set a record _without_ me?”

“I couldn’t exactly set a record _with_ you,” Keith said dryly, and Lance crossing his arms huffily.

“Fine.” He flung out an arm, leveling his finger in Keith’s direction. “You and me. Tomorrow. We’re breaking Shiro’s record if it _kills_ us.”

Arching his eyebrow, Keith leaned an elbow on the console and propped his chin in his hand. “Breaking _my_ record, you mean?”

“Nope. Doesn’t count.”

“I think it does.”

“Well I don’t care what you think, _Keith_. We’re getting that top spot, and Shiro can just suck it.”

Keith gave in, shaking his head. “Whatever you say, Lance.”

* * *

With the maze conquered, Coran sent Lance and Keith off to shower and change, warning them that Allura was probably going to call them for some easy cleanup down on Merkul’s surface today. Keith nodded, high spirits lending him an oddly light gait as he headed down to the prep room and shed his armor.

He expected Lance to have beat him there, but he still hadn’t shown up by the time Keith climbed into the shower to rinse off. He let the water run down his back for longer than normal, shaking his head at the bubble of hilarity that had yet to break.

He could only imagine what Shiro would have said if he’d been there to witness that shipwreck of a maze run. Shiro was a much calmer controller than Keith—a fact they’d learned very early on in their attempts at the invisible maze. He would have kept Keith clear away from the gladiator. If there’d been a gladiator. They had yet to try it on advanced mode, and Keith was both eager and wary about being in the maze with a level five gladiator.

Slowly the giddiness faded to a softer warmth, and Keith shut off the tap, grabbing his towel to dry off.

He emerged from the shower stall just as Lance disappeared into the one next door. Lance eeped as he slammed the door, and the sound of running water quickly covered his labored breathing. Keith quirked an eyebrow at the shower door, then shrugged and went to change back into his borrowed Altean jumpsuit.

On the bench where he’d left his clothes, Keith found several new pieces of clothing. Lance’s?

Keith glanced over to where Lance had left his own jeans and shirt in a heap on the bench, his hooded jacket hanging crooked on a towel hook. Keith glanced back down at the pile of neatly-folded clothes beside his own.

Not Lance’s, then.

“Hey, what is this stuff on the bench?”

Lance let out a low, uncertain noise before he said, haltingly, “They’re clothes. For you. Your clothes.” He paused for a few seconds, as though waiting for a response, then added, “If you want them. No pressure.”

Stunned, Keith reached out to inspect the offering. Black pants, slim through the leg and slightly stretchy, probably made of whatever the Alteans used in their clothes. A plain, short-sleeved shirt, dark gray and made of a soft material that felt like thakka—breathable and moisture-wicking, which made it a popular fabric for training garb.

The third piece was by far the most impressive. It was a jacket, red and white, with a high, stiff collar and a yellow stripe across the chest. Keith didn’t recognize the fabric, but it was thick and sturdy.

Inside, just below the collar, Keith’s name had been embroidered in Galran script. Below it was a smiling red lion head.

The embroidery blurred, and Keith sat down hard on the bench, blinking furiously. He gathered the jacket in both hands, running his thumbs over the neat stitches, the clean lines, the meticulous lion-head design below his name.

“Did you _make_ this?” Keith asked, his voice so low he wasn’t even sure if Lance could hear the question.

But a moment later the shower shut off, and Lance said, “Yeah. Coran helped me with the lettering, so if it looks funny it's because we had to use some ten-thousand-year-old fuddy duddy's alphabet."

"It's fine," Keith said. "Our alphabet hasn't changed since Zarkon came to power."

"Good to know. But like I said, you don’t have to wear it—Coran and Allura both prefer the Altean stuff, so, y’know, no hard feelings.”

Keith’s hands tightened on the jacket. “No,” he said quickly. “That’s not—I—Thanks.”

It felt insufficient next to the obvious effort Lance had put into the clothes, but he could think of nothing else to say. Silently he got dressed, amazed that the clothes fit so well—Rover, Lance explained, sheepishly. Back when Shiro and Keith joined, Lance had asked Pidge to program Rover to collect everyone’s measurements, and the little drone had included Keith in his survey.

“That’s not creepy,” Lance asked, “is it?”

“It is kinda, yeah,” Keith said pulling on the jacket. “I’ll let it slide this time.”

“Phew. I was worried there for a second.” Lance stepped out of the shower, a towel wrapped around his waist, and cocked his head to study Keith. “Looks good.”

Keith tugged self-consciously on the hem of the jacket. “Is it supposed to be shorter than yours?”

Lance nodded, turning to shake out his clothes and get dressed. “You’re always carrying around that knife. I figured it would be hard to get to the sheath with a normal jacket. I can redo it if you want.”

“No, this is--” _perfect_ “--fine.” Keith straightened the sleeves, well aware that he was fidgeting but too hyper-aware of his body to stop. “How long did this take you?”

“Longer than it should have,” Lance said, distracted with trying to turn his shirt right side out. “I started it forever ago, and then I put it off because...” He trailed off, then glanced at Keith over his shoulder.

“Because…?”

Flushing, Lance tugged his shirt over his head. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not going to make excuses.”

Keith sat, watching unreadable emotions flit across Lance’s face. “I want to understand. We’re a team, aren’t we?”

Lance turned, seemingly surprised, then managed a weak smile. “Yeah,” he said. “We are.” He paused while he shrugged into his jacket and fiddled with the hood. “I should have done this—all of this—ages ago. I just… was afraid to think about it too hard.”

“Why?”

“Because every time I thought about you, or saw you, or talked to you, it ended up with me thinking about all the other Galra we’ve fought, and how many of them were like you.”

“What do you mean, like me?”

Lance gave a shrug, curling in on himself. “Good. Honest.” He spread his hands. “How many of them could be heroes, if we let them?”

Keith blinked, wondering how many times it was possible for one person to surprise him. It felt like the gladiator had knocked the breath from his lungs, and by the time he recovered, Lance had dropped down onto the bench opposite Keith, hands in his lap, picking at his nails.

Shaking himself, Keith leaned forward. “It’s not as many as you think.”

Lance met his eyes, unblinking.

“It’s not like they let just anyone into the army. You have to sign up—there’s no draft. We— _They_ don’t need one. There are way more administrative and transport and mercantile jobs in the empire than military positions. Even the people who sign up still have to survive training—and that’s set up to weed out the weak. The merciful.”

“What do you mean, weed out?”

Keith shrugged. “If you aren’t ruthless enough, or strong enough, or loyal enough, you’re reassigned. Banished to a work camp on some prison world somewhere, maybe. The kids who washed out of my class ended up on Revinor, mostly. Metal refinery, I think, on a frozen planet way out in the old reaches."

"Wait." Lance grabbed Keith's wrists and stared at him, eyes wide. " _Kids?_ "

Keith squirmed, but didn't pull away from Lance's grip. He didn't want to undo the progress they'd made today. "Uh, yeah? Officers' kids start training at eight standard. Most regular soldiers enlist later, after their Proof, but I mean... If you last too long before the higher ups recognize your 'weakness,' they don't bother shipping you off to a prison world. You just die.”

Lance’s eyes squeezed shut, and he muttered a soft but emphatic curse as he leaned back.

“Look, the _last_ thing Zarkon wants is an army full of people who’ll ditch him for Team Voltron first chance they get. I’m sure there are probably _some_ others like me out there, but it’s not nearly as many as you’re thinking.”

Lance was silent for the space of several heartbeats, and Keith wondered whether telling him had helped or only made things worse. Then Lance let out a long, whistling breath, and smiled. “Thanks for telling me, Keith, really. It helps.”

Slowly, Keith relaxed. “Uh, sure. Any time?”

Lance stood, brushing off his jeans, and beamed at Keith. “Have you eaten?”

“Not since breakfast.”

Lance glanced at his watch, frowning. “It’s _still_ breakfast for some of us, Keith. How long have you been up?”

Keith shrugged. “Long enough.”

With a disgusted noise, Lance grabbed Keith’s arm and dragged him toward the door. “Whatever. We’re getting brunch, and then you’re going to tell me what other kinds of clothes you want.”

“But...” Keith glanced down at the clothes he was wearing. “What’s wrong with these?”

Lance gave him a look like he’d just asked why swords were sharp. “I’ve made everyone else at least two outfits. I just wanted your opinion before I made the next one.”

“Oh.” Keith plucked at the zipper on the jacket. “Can you make more like this?”

“You don’t understand the concept of a _wardrobe_ , do you?” Lance asked, but he was smiling in a way that made Keith smile back. “Come on, Chewbacca. Food goo awaits.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reminder that the Coran-centric sidestory, [One Week to Say Goodbye](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9301925/chapters/21083582) is now up. Next chapter (which includes Coran and Alfor's first meeting) comes out on Thursday, just before I disappear to binge season 2. (Come scream at me on Tumblr @squirenonny when you've watched it!)
> 
> Update! There's now [fanart](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/156992297659/susie-d-applesauce-i-really-like-this) to go with this chapter! Thank you so much, Suz!


	7. Coming Clean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Lance pulled an all-nighter sewing and thinking. In the morning, following an emotional discussion with Coran about the ethics of war, Lance apologized to Keith and invited him to try some one-on-one team building in the invisible maze. It didn't exactly go smoothly, but they made it through and had their first real conversation afterwards.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season two is out! But don't worry--you aren't going to run into any spoilers here. Not any time soon, anyway. I've already got a LOT of this story plotted out, and I'm not planning on changing it to accommodate season 2. (It's already an AU, anyway, right?) A few things I have planned fit in well with canon, so you'll see some small things eventually (starting six weeks from now, give or take), but until you read otherwise, it's safe to assume that the Duality-verse disregards canon starting from season 2.
> 
> That being said, if you _have_ watched season 2, you might be interested in my canon-compliant, post-episode 8 addition, [Knowledge or Death (And Ignorance is Bliss)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9402671). [Note: **Spoilers.** So many spoilers at the link.]

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1349  
>  Dated nine months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Subject 5Cf* has yielded no noteworthy results for fifteen solar cycles and is being removed from deprivation trials effective immediately. Lady Haggar has requested feral-type subjects for her Project Robeast, so 5Cf (ID 155-9870) will remain sedated for transfer to Haggar’s main research facility.
> 
> Replacing 5Cf in extended deprivation chamber #2 is Subject 5N, Prisoner ID 118-9875.**

*Pidge’s notes: 5Cf = Aurel

**Pidge’s notes: 118-9875 was Matt’s prisoner ID

* * *

Allura called the paladins together mid-morning, castle time. With luck, the Galra down on the surface would have stayed alert through the night, and fatigue would ease the paladins’ work. The others gathered quickly and efficiently, as usual—all except for Keith and Lance, whose absence was as noteworthy as it was troubling.

“Think we should send out search parties?” Pidge asked in an undertone. They’d taken advantage of the delay by logging into their bridge station and pulling up the research logs they were translating, and they hardly looked up as Shiro and Matt traded meaningful looks, as if the pair of them honestly _were_ considering heading out in search of the missing paladins.

“That won’t be necessary,” Allura assured them, giving Pidge a pointed look (for all that they saw it.) She kept her voice firm. It was important to display confidence in one’s teammates, even when they hadn’t entirely earned it. “Keith and Lance are both mature enough not to get into any serious fights.” Hunk nodded, Matt looked thoughtful, and Shiro kept his face blank. Pidge seemed not to have even heard.

“Allura’s right,” Coran said, much too brightly to be entirely innocent. “I wouldn’t worry about the two of them. Shall we get started?”

“Not without Keith and Lance,” Shiro said. Then he frowned. “Did either of them say anything about not coming today?” His gaze lingered on Hunk longer than the rest of them, but no one spoke up.

“Perhaps they were in the middle of something?” Shay suggested.

Matt tilted his head to the side. “True. It wasn’t exactly an emergency summons. Maybe Lance stopped to put away his sewing or something.”

“I’m pretty sure he finished all his projects last night,” Hunk said. “He might be sleeping, though. He pulled an all-nighter.”

Pidge frowned. “Why the quiznak would he do that?”

“I don’t think he really _meant_ to. He just...” Hunk shrugged, looking uncomfortable. “He’s got a lot on his mind.”

Allura, Shiro, and Matt glanced at one another. Neither Matt nor Shiro had said anything outright, but it was obvious they were both worried about Lance. After Lance pulled out of the mission the day before to transport the Merka to the castle, Matt had been quick to jump to his defense, and Shiro had needed hardly any further prodding.

Allura was worried about him, as well, though her concern stemmed mostly from the probability that he would continue to butt heads with Keith and chip away at Team Voltron’s efficacy, both on and off the field.

“Ooh,” Hunk said suddenly smiling. “I’ll bet Lance went down to see the Merka. They’re really attached to him after yesterday. He probably couldn’t get away.”

“And Keith?” Pidge asked. “He’s never late to anything. What do you think held him up, if not Lance?”

“You’re _joking_.”

At the sound of Keith’s voice, every pair of eyes swiveled toward the door, where Keith had just appeared, wearing new—and decidedly _not_ Altean—clothing. Lance walked two steps ahead of him, backward, grinning.

“I’m _serious_ ,” Lance said. “Best pilot in my class. Ask anyone!”

Noticing the attention trained on him, Keith stopped walking. “Oh… Uh, hi.”

Lance cocked his head to the side, then turned around, grinned, and bounded over to the holomap where everyone was gathered. “Sorry, didn’t realize we were so late. Hunk, tell Keith what a great pilot I am.”

“Uh…” Hunk frowned at Lance, then glanced over at Keith, who looked like he was trying to join the group as inconspicuously as possible. “Sorry, did… Did I miss something?”

“Yeah,” Pidge said blandly. “The part where Lance became the best pilot in our class instead of two points away from cargo pilot.”

Lance narrowed his eyes at them. “Oh, real nice, Gunderson. Talk about squad loyalty.”

Pidge grinned, snapped off their display, and came toward the holomap, elbowing Keith as they passed.

Keith smiled at them, then turned to Lance, a devious smirk on his face. “Cargo pilot, huh?”

“Pidge!” Lance groaned. “Now look what you’ve done!”

Matt bent over so his elbows were resting on the holomap pedestal and regarded Lance with something like amusement. “Hey, fair’s fair, Lance. You’ve given Keith plenty of nicknames.”

Pidge adjusted their glasses, giving Lance a calculating look. To Keith, they said, “You could always call him the _Tailor_.”

“Why?” Keith asked, looking down at himself. “Because of the clothes?”

Lance clapped a hand over Pidge’s mouth. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s exactly it.”

“So you _did_ make Keith clothes.” Hunk inched closer, squinting at Keith’s jacket. “These are _really_ nice, Lance. How long did you spend on them?”

“Oh, you know.” Lance chuckled nervously. “A while. Who wants to change the subject?”

Allura shook her head to dispell her shock. “All right. What happened? Since when do _you two_ get along?”

“Since they ran the invisible maze together,” Coran said, beaming. “Lance’s idea.”

Keith snorted. “One that ended in first degree burns.” He glanced at Shiro. “Sorry we’re late, by the way. I had to run Lance through a quick cryopod cycle so he’d stop complaining about the numbness.”

“It was weird!” Lance protested. “I happen to like being able to feel my fingers!”

“Then don’t ask me to run you through the maze next time, genius. Especially not on advanced mode.”

“Advanced mode?” Allura gasped. She shot a glower at Coran. “I thought we agreed the paladins weren’t ready for that yet.”

Coran shrugged innocently. “Wasn’t _my_ idea.”

Allura turned back to Lance and Keith, who had gotten sidetracked with a debate about how successful their run had been. It was disorienting to watch them. They bickered just like they always had, but their words were less heated, and Lance stood with a relaxed posture she hadn’t seen in him for quite some time. Keith almost seemed to be _smiling_.

She felt the faintest twinge of indignation. All her efforts to make them see sense, all those weeks of running up against a wall, and _now_ they suddenly tossed all their issues out the airlock?

Allura took a deep breath and let it out. As long as they were getting along, it didn’t really matter what had happened.

Besides, it _was_ good to see Lance smile again.

“Right, well.” Allura spread her hands on the holomap pedestal. “Now that we’re all here, let’s get started.”

“Ooh! Allura!” Lance’s hand shot up, and he bounced on his toes until Allura gestured for him to speak. “Do we have any plans for the next job after we’re finished here?”

Allura frowned. “Nothing definite at this point. There are a few distress beacons we have our eye on, but it will depend on how long it takes to ensure Merkul is safe.”

“Great. Because I have an idea for the place we should hit next.”

“You… do?” Allura asked.

Lance nodded. “Revinor.”

Keith sucked in a breath. “ _Lance._ ”

With a lopsided smile, Lance turned to give Keith a shrug. “What? I think it’s a good idea.”

“But--” Keith floundered, speechless.

“Sorry.” Allura turned to the keypad to search for the planet Lance had mentioned. “What’s on Revinor?”

“Galra,” said Keith. His gaze stuck on Lance for a long moment, then darted around the room, coming to rest on Allura. “The Galra who refused to fight in Zarkon’s war, or who he thought might betray him. Some of them, anyway.”

“They all get sent away to mining camps and factories,” Lance explained. “Anyone who stands up to Zarkon, anyone who doesn’t all-out _jump for joy_ when Zarkon said, Hey, go kill these people for no discernible reason except I’m a douche.”

Matt looked troubled. “His own people? Damn.”

Lance nodded. He glanced again at Keith, who smiled faintly. This seemed to galvanize Lance, and he leaned toward the stellar map, which now showed Revinor, and poked at the tiny planet. “Look, they need our help as much as anyone, _and_ it’s a smart move.”

“Smart how?” Hunk asked. “I mean, I’m all for saving people, but isn’t this just gonna antagonize Zarkon even more?”

“Probably.” Lance tapped his chin, thoughtful. “But, look. Striking here would send a message. To Zarkon, to his troops, to the whole universe. Voltron protects everyone, no matter who they are, as long as they aren’t _actively_ helping Zarkon.”

“It gives Galra soldiers a third option.” Keith’s voice was soft. He shrunk down as several pairs of eyes turned toward him, and he kept his eyes on the holo-projector as he continued. “In the army, there’s only two choices. Victory, or death. You either do what Zarkon wants—and do it well—or you die. Or, well, sometimes you get exiled to someplace like Revinor, but most people consider that the same thing as dying.”

He looked up at them all, hunching his shoulders.

“There is no _leaving_ the army. Anyone who tries is hunted down and executed. Vrekt, I’m sure there’s a bounty on _my_ head big enough to attract the kind of attention I couldn’t escape on my own.”

“No one runs,” Matt said quietly. “Even if they don’t agree with what Zarkon’s doing, they stay because there’s no other choice.” He looked up at Keith, and Allura saw something pass between them, something that made Keith tense for a brief moment, then relax, smiling.

“They stay until they find a third choice,” Keith said. “For me, that was Shiro.” He nodded his head toward the hologram of Revinor. “ _This_ could be the third choice for everyone else. I mean, they aren’t likely to defect by the thousands, but for however many people _are_ questioning this war?”

“It gives them a chance,” Coran said. There seemed to be more weight to his words than Allura could understand, and he gave Lance a brilliant smile.

Lance nodded. “And even they don’t defect, then by the time we start to really turn the tide, maybe they’ll think it’s better to surrender and trust to our mercy than to keep fighting a losing battle.” He glanced around, arms spread wide. “It’s worth a try, don’t you think?”

Matt and Keith nodded at once. Shiro looked like he wanted to, as well, but he turned his eyes to Allura. “It’s your call, Princess,” he said. “But for what it’s worth, I think Lance is right. It could win us allies, or at least weaken Zarkon’s forces. We need that.”

Allura stared at the stellar map, contemplating Lance’s proposal as, one by one, the rest of the team nodded.

“All right,” Allura said. “We’ll gather intel as we clear out the rest of this system, and once we know more we’ll begin making plans. _Assuming_ ,” she went on, as Lance pumped his fists in the air and tried to high-five Keith, who responded rather awkwardly with a closed fist. “Assuming that the information we gather doesn’t suggest Revinor is too heavily guarded for our strike to be successful.”

“It won’t be,” Keith said. He was smiling, almost as energetic as Lance. “Zarkon doesn’t care about the exiled planets. As long as the prisoners don’t get off-world, he basically pretends they don’t exist. From what I’ve heard, the factories there are almost entirely monitored by sentries.”

Allura nodded. “Very well, then.” She swiped to return the holo-display to its previous coordinates, centered on Merkul. “For now, we have a job to finish here.”

“Yeah!” Lance pumped his fists in the air and turned toward the elevators. “Let’s go kick ass!”

Shiro grabbed him by the shoulder, halting him mid-step. “Hang on, Lance. Is it true you didn’t get any sleep last night?”

Lance’s eyes widened, and he glared at Hunk, who blushed and busied himself poking at the controls on the holo-map. Sighing, Lance turned back to Shiro. “ _Yes_ ,” he groaned.

“Then maybe you’d better go get some rest.”

“But--”

“We’re done with the worst of the fighting here, Lance. We’d be fine with half the team, and I don’t want you to push yourself too hard.”

Lance hesitated, staring at the floor. “I’m fine, Shiro. Really.”

“I know.” Shiro squeezed his shoulder and waited for Lance to look up before giving him a warm smile. “And you should know I’m proud of you.” Shiro’s gaze flickered to Keith, who was smiling as he watched the exchange, so neither of them probably saw the tears that welled up suddenly in Lance’s eyes.

Allura did, though, and she reminded herself how young these paladins were, how very much they’d accomplished despite the odds stacked against them. “Shiro is right, Lance,” she said, offering her own smile. “Go rest. You’ve more than earned it.”

Lance laughed, a little watery, and kicked his leg up as he spun toward the door. “All right, all _right_. I’m not gonna complain about getting a little extra beauty sleep, jeez.” He raised a hand as he reached the door. “Have fun punching jerkwads, kids!”

* * *

Eli Kahale leaned back in the careworn computer chair, rubbing his eyes. A quick glance at the clock over the television told him he’d been staring at his laptop for close to five hours now, and he had very little to show for it. Val was still missing—going on two weeks now. Hunk and his squadmates had been gone even longer. If Eli didn’t find something solid soon, they might well miss their one chance to bring those kids back alive.

Eli rubbed at his dry eyes, then snapped his computer shut and headed for the kitchen. Karen would be home soon, dead on her feet after another day at the office on nowhere near enough sleep. She was treating the search for her family like another full-time job, poring over files and news stories and calling anyone she could think of who might help. The efforts kept her up past midnight every night. Sometimes she was still hunched over her computer when Eli turned in.

Flipping on the stove, Eli started poking through the fridge. Unlike Karen, he wasn’t working a day job right now. Perks of being self-employed, he supposed: you actually _could_ drop everything if something came up. Maybe not the best financial decision, but there was no one above him to tell him what to do.

It was ironic, really. Akira was the one turning up actual useful information, though he couldn’t pass it on quickly or easily with Iverson breathing down his neck. Karen was making progress, too, putting together a case for the wrongful death suit, reaching out to parents of some other students who had been injured during Garrison training exercises to see if they wanted to sue for negligence.

And Eli, who had more time than either of them, was making the least progress of all.

He knew how this sort of thing went. Sow the seeds, nurture them, wait for the payoff. He’d spent the last few weeks trawling social media, news sites, even conspiracy boards. He rotated through accounts and posted mostly from public computers, just in case the Garrison tried to trace the whispers back to the source.

Everywhere he went he redirected attention to the supposed accident. Some places, he called for the Garrison to be held accountable. Some places he asked probing questions—sometimes subtle, sometimes not—that poked holes in the official story.

Sometimes, he just talked about the three cadets. He’d gathered stories from their friends—mostly outside the Garrison, so far; they weren’t ready to put Iverson on guard just yet—and spread them around, reminding the faceless masses that the three teens had been _people_ , and not just a sad news story.

The last few days, he’d taken it a step further.

_Persephone._

It was a household name, even more than a year after the disaster. The Kerberos mission had been the highest-profile launch in decades, and the entire country had followed the mission tracker. When tragedy struck, the whole world mourned.

It was easy to get people talking about it again. Eli started with his personal accounts, bringing back old footage he’d posted, putting together a new memorial video. He let himself be a little bit heavy handed in these posts. He was a grieving uncle; Iverson would expect the bitterness. No one would think too much about the family of a dead cadet dredging up the Garrison’s last big screw-up as a way to flip the bird to Hunk’s killers.

Elsewhere, Eli was more cautious. He backdated memorial posts to the one year anniversary, then spread them around on his more active fake profiles. He hunted down every opinion piece and heartfelt tribute he could find and started them circulating again.

He wanted people talking about the _Persephone_. He wanted to make sure they remembered.

Karen walked through the front door just as Eli was finishing dinner. He pulled the chicken out of the oven, checked the sauce, then turned to greet Karen as she entered the kitchen, sniffing the air.

“You’re going to spoil me at this rate, Eli,” she said, draping her blazer over the back of her chair. “Once you’re gone, I’m going to be eating like a broke college kid again.”

Eli laughed, plating the meal—rice, chicken, and a cream sauce—and brought it to the table. “It’s the least I can do, as much as I’m mooching off you.”

She gave him a _look_. “I wasn’t going to let you languish in an extended stay, Eli.”

“And I’m not going to let you gorge yourself on instant ramen.” Eli set down two glasses of wine with a definitive _clink_.

Relenting, Karen raised her wineglass in a silent toast, then drained half the glass in a single gulp. “So, is this a celebration, or are we drinking to forget?”

Eli didn’t answer straight away. He hadn’t exactly _labored_ over the meal, but even so it would be a shame to ruin his appetite with an argument before he’d taken a single bite.

He’d forgotten the way Karen was once she’d sunk her claws into something. She set down her fork and knife after just two bites.

“All right, out with it.”

Eli gave the innocent act one last good faith effort, then sighed, wiped his mouth with his napkin, and laid his hands on the table. “I think you need to go public.”

Karen stared at him, uncomprehending. “With what?”

“Everything. Val’s investigation, Pidge’s real identity, the text they sent the night after the so-called accident.” Eli caught her eye. “Karen, the Garrison is too tough to crack with a civil suit. You _know_ that. If we can draw more attention to this story, put some real pressure on Iverson, maybe prompt an outside investigation…”

“Turn my life into another media circus, you mean.” Karen’s lips had gone white, her eyebrows sharply arched. She didn’t look angry (she rarely did), but her demeanor screamed a warning. “I dealt with all that after the Kerberos mission, Eli, and that didn’t lead to anything.”

“Because there was no evidence of a coverup back then.” Eli held up his hands before Karen could work herself up. “Just…think about it. There’s no rush. I just think this might be our best bet.”

Karen stared down at her plate, and Eli could see the gears turning in her head as she weighed the pros and cons of telling her kid’s story. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll consider it. But there’s something I else I want to try first.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

Karen smiled. “You said you’re on good terms with the producers on some of the local channels, right?”

Eli arched an eyebrow, intrigued by the question’s devious undertone. “I’ve still got a few favors to cash in. What did you have in mind?”

* * *

It took three more days before they were certain the Galra had been completely driven from Merkul. Deactivated sentries still littered the moons, but they were slowly being dismantled and repurposed into tools, shields, and weapons that the Merka could use to defend themselves if Zarkon ever returned.

Shiro and Lance brought the last load of miners from the castle-ship, where they’d taken shelter from the fighting, to the moons, where their families and friends greeted them with ear-splitting shrieks and… hugs? Shiro was happy for them all, but he couldn’t help hoping none of them would turn their celebrations his way. When you were sturdy and thick-skinned like the Merka, claws as thick as jackhammers probably hurt a lot less.

They bid the refugees farewell just about the time Allura wrapped up her diplomatic meeting with the local leaders—a massive undertaking, considering Merkul had no central government. Each of the two moon had several independent warrens, each with their own structure and customs, and each warren insisted on being present at the meeting with Princess Allura.

By the time Shiro joined Allura and Coran on the bridge, she looked frazzled and exhausted, collapsing into the black paladin’s chair with a heavy sigh.

“Long meeting?” Shiro asked, trying not to smile.

Allura massaged her temples. “I’m used to long meetings. That felt more like a free-for-all!”

“The Merka do seem… enthusiastic.”

“ _That_ ,” Allura said, “is quite the understatement.”

Coran, who looked nearly as weary as Allura, though a bit more poised, smoothed his mustache. “We ended up giving each warren its own communicator, just to keep them from setting up a tournament to decide who got to keep it.”

Shiro chuckled. “What, like some kind of local sport? That doesn’t seem so bad. These people could probably use the entertainment.”

The look Allura gave him quashed that idea immediately. “A tournament of arms,” she said. “Champions from each warren fighting to the death for their people’s honor.”

“To the _death_?” Shiro’s eyebrows shot up. “I thought the Merka were a peaceful people.”

“Evidently not when warren rivalry is in play.”

They lapsed into silence, and Shiro turned his gaze to the viewscreens, through which he could see the planet’s surface far below. The last three days had mostly been spent underground, fighting Galra on foot. Lance had seemed much more confident in these fights, and had pulled Shiro aside once to thank him for what he’d said.

_I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet, but… it helped. Knowing you’d been there, too._

Shiro had just smiled, squeezed Lance’s shoulder, and told him the offer still stood. Whatever he wanted to talk about, whenever he was feeling up to it.

It was about time Shiro took his own advice.

“Princess Allura, there’s something I need to tell you.”

She turned at his words, as did Coran. Shiro briefly contemplated asking Coran to leave, but he deserved to know as much as anyone. Really, Shiro should have told the whole team long before now.

But they were his men, and he was their captain, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of losing their trust.

He didn’t want to lose Allura’s trust, either, but in holding onto this secret, Shiro had sabotaged their shot at copiloting the Black Lion. He’d felt his secrets close in around his mind like a wall, impenetrable no matter how Allura tried to reach out to him. It was time he came clean.

He stood up straighter, squared his shoulders, and looked Allura in the eye as he spoke. “Haggar built something into my arm. An override. If she’s close enough, she can take control of me.”

“ _What?_ ” Allura gasped. To the side, Coran’s stiff, formal posture faltered, and he stepped forward, shock and horror warring with pity on his face.

“You can’t be serious,” Coran whispered.

Shiro closed his eyes. “I am. That’s what happened back on Berlou. When she attacked me with that black lightning, she was trying to take control. It must not work as well from a distance like that, because I was able to fight it, a little, but if we ever end up face-to-face with her--” Shiro’s voice wavered, and he took a moment to breathe. He opened his eyes, but kept his gaze downcast. “I’m a liability to this team. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner.”

For a long moment the bridge was silent. Shiro wanted to face this with his head held high, unflinching and resolute, but he couldn’t. It was all he could do not to waver on his feet.

Allura was the first to find her voice.

“Well _that’s_ a relief.”

Shiro looked up, startled. “Princess?”

Smiling, Allura stood and approached Shiro, her hands folded before her. She’d changed into a formal gown for her meeting with the Merka leaders, and her hair cascaded down her back in loose white curls. Somehow it made her look even more imposing than her battle armor, but she met his eyes calmly.

“I was afraid Zarkon had found a way to forcibly take control of the lions sometime in the last ten thousand years,” she said. “An override chip in your arm is _much_ less terrifying.”

“But Haggar can take control of _me_. She can turn me against the rest of the team!”

“She can.” Allura held up one finger. “ _If_ she is close enough, and _if_ we don’t figure out how to remove or deactivate the override.”

The fist around Shiro’s heart began to loosen. “You can do that?”

“It should be possible,” Coran said, stepping up beside Shiro. “It might take some time, if she’s hidden it well, but once we locate the problem, it’ll be easy enough to shut her out.”

Shiro let out a long, shuddering breath, laughing weakly. “I thought--” He stopped himself and covered his face with his hands. It took him a second to pull himself together, then he turned to Coran. “How soon can you get started?”

“We can go scan your arm right now.” Coran paused, frowning. “Shiro… This will go faster if we dedicate all our resources to the problem.”

Shiro felt cold. “You mean tell the others.”

Coran grimaced, but nodded. “I can see that it was difficult for you to tell us, but Matt and Hunk are both brilliant engineers, and Pidge may be able to tease apart whatever program controls the override.”

“It’s your choice, Shiro,” Allura assured him, when he failed to answer right away. “But Coran is right. The others can help.”

“No, you’re right.” Shiro took a deep breath and let it out. It was a little easier, knowing this was not an unsolvable problem. “I’ll tell them, just… give me a little while to figure out how.”

Coran nodded. “Of course. In the mean time, let’s get you scanned, and I’ll see what it is we have to work with while the rest of you focus on freeing Revinor.”

He waved for Shiro to follow him, and Shiro did, giving both Coran and Allura grateful smiles. “Thank you,” he said. “Really.”

“There’s no need to thank us, Shiro,” Allura said, falling into step beside him. “We’re a team. We help each other—that’s what it means to be a paladin of Voltron.” She smiled at him, and Shiro couldn’t help but smile back.

* * *

Thace turned his head to crack his neck, his eyes never leaving the screen. For once he’d managed to find a private archive room in which he could research CORE for the resistance. He had no other appointments today, but most of the lesser officers were busy with drills and paperwork for the end-of-quarter inspection, so the Archives were likely to remain quiet.

Of course, he still couldn’t find anything on CORE. In eighteen solar cycles, he’d found only one nonspecific reference to the project, in a memo from a druid to a researcher named Ferka. He only knew the name because it was in the memo itself; the recipient was restricted, and despite the impressive arsenal of access codes Thace had stolen or forged during his long career, he couldn’t seem to strip away the digital screens.

That in itself told him something. Thace had access to over eighty percent of the empire’s digital records. The only things he couldn’t break into at this point were either local networks that weren’t connected to the main Galra computer lattice or projects Zarkon or Haggar had a personal hand in.

Granted, the resistance already suspected CORE was Haggar’s brainchild, but this confirmed it. The druids were involved, as was at least one research lab. The two were entirely independent, except for Haggar’s oversight, so the fact that they were apparently cooperating on this project meant there would be communication, if only Thace could find it.

Without any way to get into Haggar’s personal files, Thace had turned his attention instead to Project Robeast. This, like CORE, was one of Haggar’s research efforts, though it had gone public nearly two standard years earlier. Back then it had just been cybernetic upgrades like mechanical limbs and sensory augmentation. Something the resistance needed to be aware of, but not nearly a high enough priority to warrant intervention.

That was before the true robeasts came to light after Voltron’s return. Monstrous creatures—living, but more machine than flesh—strong enough to threaten whole fleets. Every agent had been tasked with ferreting out the source of the creatures, along with any weaknesses that could be exploited.

Thace had been slacking on that front in the months he’d been shadowing Keena’s son to keep the fool prince from getting himself killed, but he was back at it now, and the more he read, the more unhappy he became.

But concerns about future battles paled in comparison to what he found in an unassuming file simply titled _Preliminary Modifications_.

The file had been deleted from its local server, but whoever had done so had neglected to purge the master copy from the lattice and so, after several hours of following the thread of Project Robeast deeper and deeper into the archives, Thace stumbled upon it.

It was a simple bulleted list under the heading _117-9875: Champion._

> Prosthetic Arm: INSTALLED
> 
> Energy blade mode: INSTALLED, AWAITING FIELD TEST
> 
> Quintessence siphon mode: PENDING
> 
> Druidic mode: PENDING
> 
> Override chip: INSTALLED, AWAITING FIELD TEST
> 
> Tracking chip: INSTALLED, ACTIVE

Thace’s blood ran cold. A tracking chip? _And_ an override? On the Champion—the human Keith had risked everything to help. _Vrekt_. Thace should have realized. Nearly the whole time they’d been in the field, starting rebellions and trying their damndest to throw their lives away, anonymous sources had reported their activity faster than seemed possible—faster than Thace could keep up with, certainly. It had been all Thace could do not to let those reports fall into Orgul’s hands.

They’d been tracking Shiro.

They probably were _still_ tracking Shiro, and by extension, Voltron.

Swearing colorfully, Thace began his usual backtracking. He used spoofed accounts for all his research so nothing could be traced back to him, but when he could he liked to erase his tracks as he left. Better not to tip Zarkon off to the sorts of questions that were being asked.

He’d barely begun when the archive room door hissed opened. Thace tensed, resisting the urge to leap to his feet only by the force of old habit.

Nevertheless, his hand went surreptitiously to the hilt of his hidden dagger as he turned toward the new arrival.

“Nadezda.” Thace let out a thin laugh, relaxing. “ _Must_ you always be so dramatic?”

For once, Dez didn’t correct Thace on his use of her full name. In fact, there was no trace of humor in her face.

Two IntSec agents stood behind her, blocking the door.

Tension crept back into Thace’s stance. “What is this?”

“Lieutenant Commander Thace,” Dez said with more formality than Thace had ever heard from her. “Come with me.”

Thace didn’t move. “Come where?”

A trace of pity flickered across Dez’s face, gone almost before Thace recognized it. She gestured her agents forward and they stood one on either side of Thace, holding him by the elbow. His pistol and sword were snatched away, though neither of them knew to check beneath his armor, in a hollow at the base of his spine, for his knife.

Dez didn’t correct them, which was at least mildly reassuring.

“Thace drul Vesely,” she said flatly. “By order of Commander Prorok, I’m placing you under arrest, on suspicion of treason against the Galra Empire.”

* * *

Revinor was quiet.

Allura regarded the distant world with some curiosity as the lions approached. From here, it seemed unassuming, uninhabited even. It wasn’t a true planet under most classifications, but a binary planetoid system. Revinor was slightly larger than its twin, Rhonnar, but no less bleak. The star the planetoids orbited was too distant to provide much sunlight—or heat, for that matter. Revinor and Rhonnar were ovoid lumps of rock and ice not worth the trace elements extracted at the refineries.

Coran had done much of the legwork researching and planning this mission, Lance and Keith often joining him. Pidge had managed to download a copy of the Galra database through Keith’s old wrist-mounted computer, and it was there they’d found most of the information they needed.

Revinor was one of the older exile planets in the Empire, and one of the harshest—which was no doubt why it was used to scare naughty children into obeying their teachers. Once every standard year, prisoners were rounded up from temporary work camps, prisons, and—apparently—schools, and shipped off to Revinor to work in the refineries.

Once there, the prisoners were watched by sentries, who were deployed periodically from orbit in sealed modules. The sentries oversaw the day-to-day operations in the refineries. If the workers stepped out of line, they were shot.

If, as had happened several times since Revinor was first claimed, the prisoners banded together to start a revolt—if they stole the sentries’ weapons or found a way to deactivate them—emergency parameters kicked in. Food goo production stopped, heaters powered down, and Revinor waited for its prisoners to succumb to its unforgiving climate.

At the end of the year, new workers arrived, and the process began again.

Keith said the trigger for the emergency protocols was likely the number of active sentries, and had shot down Coran’s suggestion that Revinor was monitored by someone on the outside.

“Zarkon doesn’t care about these worlds,” he said, “except that they keep weaklings and troublemakers out of his army. Aside from the prison transport ship once a year, there’s no way off-planet, so what does it matter to him if the prisoners try to cause trouble?”

Armed with a rough idea of what they were up against, Team Voltron had wormholed in near the local star. Their scanners had confirmed the information they’d found in the database. Organic and inorganic lifeforms on the surface of Revinor, clustered near one of the poles. They’d waited and watched for nearly an hour, but had detected no other activity in the system.

“This is gonna be a piece of cake,” Lance said, urging his lion ahead of the others. Allura rode once more with Shiro, though they weren’t anticipating any aerial combat.

A cursory glance at the comm channels (open on an auxiliary screen, where they were less likely to obstruct Shiro’s view) showed eager smiles on every face.

Every face, that was, except Hunk’s.

“Is something wrong, Hunk?” Allura asked.

He gave a start at Allura’s question and quickly shook his head. “Who, me? No. Nope. I’m good. It’s just...” He paused, scrunching up his nose. “Does anyone else think it’s too quiet out here?”

“It’s fine, Hunk,” Pidge said. “Just because we’ve had a run of extra chaotic missions lately doesn’t mean they’re all gonna be like that.”

“Yeah, no, I know. But something doesn’t feel right about this.”

They were nearly to Revinor now, and Allura traded looks with Shiro. The scanners still showed clear skies, and the twin planetoids were equally quiet.

Shiro reached out to mute his mic. “It’s probably nothing,” he said to Allura. “None of our scanners show anything in the system, right?”

“But Zarkon is well aware of Voltron’s capabilities, as well as the castle’s, and he’s had ten thousand years to develop technology that could fool our sensors.”

Shiro took a moment to contemplate her words, then turned to look her in the eye. “We could do a manual sweep of the area before we land,” he said. “Or we can pull out. It’s your call.”

Although she appreciated Shiro’s willingness to follow her orders, Allura knew it wasn’t that simple. Lance and Keith were both highly invested in this mission and, as it was the first time they’d been so wholly committed to the same goal, Allura was doubly reluctant to withdraw. Anyway, Shiro was right—Hunk’s fears were almost certainly unfounded. Neither the castle’s scanners, nor Zarkon’s own archives, gave any indication that Revinor was anything more than it appeared on the surface.

Allura mentally unmuted the mic. “Stick to the plan,” she said. “But keep your eyes open. If anyone sees anything suspicious, let the rest of us know at once.”

The others chorused an agreement—even Hunk, who had managed to calm down, or at least mask his anxiety, since he’d first spoken.

As they approached, Lance stretched and let out a contented sigh. “Hey, does anyone know of any resort planets outside the Galra Empire? I’m thinking once we’re done here, we pop on over for some celebratory Mai Tais, a little post-rescue R-and-R, maybe see if we can scope some cute--”

“ _Lance_ ,” Shiro said, a warning in his voice.

In the Red Lion’s cockpit, Matt and Keith were doing a poor job smothering their laughter. “How about we actually finish the rescue before we get to the after-party,” Keith said, rolling his eyes.

“And no Mai Tais,” Matt added, “unless we find a wormhole that ages you three years in an hour.”

Lance arched an eyebrow. “But is it _really_ alcohol if we’re in space?”

“Yes.” Matt, Shiro, and Pidge all spoke at once, and Hunk laughed at Lance’s dejected groan.

Allura smiled along with the rest of them—at least until static fizzled up over the connection. The visual feeds wavered, their colors dulling for a moment, and the audio briefly cut out.

It cleared a moment later, but the lapse had everyone on edge.

“Aw, man,” Hunk moaned. “I _knew_ there was something out here I didn’t like.”

Allura ignored him. “Coran, what was that?”

“Not sure, Princess.” Coran didn’t bother looking up as he spoke; he was too busy flitting from one monitor to the next, his eyes darting back and forth as he scanned the displays. “Scanners still aren’t picking anything up.”

Keith frowned. “Yeah, well the last time something like that happened, Matt and I ended up stuck fighting two robeasts alone.”

“ _Which_ ,” Matt said, grinning, “makes this the perfect chance for Shiro and Allura to sync up!”

Shiro snorted. “Don’t sound so excited,” he said dryly. “If it _is_ a robeast, things could get dangerous fast.”

“I thought we agreed that’s _exactly_ what it takes.” Matt clucked his tongue. “Come on, babe. Get with the program.”

The comms glitched again while Matt was talking, and his smile turned strained.

“Okay, there’s _definitely_ something up here,” Hunk said.

“What do we do about it, though?” Pidge asked. “We can’t fight it if we can’t see it.”

“The prisoners have to be our number one priority,” Lance said, suddenly serious. “Whatever’s messing with the comms could just be trying to distract us.”

Shay, who stood behind Coran on the castle-ship’s bridge, looked uncomfortable. “Or it could be a trap. You go down to the refinery, and you become vulnerable. It may strike when you are outside your lions and cannot form Voltron.”

Keith growled discontentedly. “So, what? We’re pulling out without even trying?”

“No one’s saying that, Keith.” Shiro kept his voice even, trying to soothe the other paladins, though the effectiveness of his attempt were questionable at best. “We just have to be smart about this.”

The fuzzing on the comms swallowed Keith’s reply, and Allura frowned. At this rate, they would lose communication entirely before much longer. If they hadn’t figured out a plan by then, they would have to pull out—and hope Keith or Lance didn’t strike out on their own.

“Everyone, calm down.” Allura leaned forward, scanning the Black Lion’s displays one last time in the vain hope that she might have detected the source of this interference. “This is what we’re going to do. Matt, Keith, and Lance—you go down to the surface and help the prisoners. If this _isn’t_ a trap, it should be straight forward enough. If you encounter any problems, you come back, and we’ll formulate a new plan. Matt, you’re in charge.”

“Whaaaat?” Lance whined.

Keith only shrugged. “That’s fair.”

Matt nodded, eyes showing he understood the gravity of the situation.

“The rest of us,” Allura went on, “will remain in the air. Our job is to head off whatever trap we may or may not spring by going in. Stay close; we might lose comms. Coran.”

“Yes, Princess.”

“Keep an eye on the long range scanners, and on Revinor itself. Use your lasers to signal us if anything happens. Two long charges, followed by one short blast, for trouble in the air. Two short and a long for trouble on the ground. Does everyone understand?”

Everyone nodded, and then the Red and Blue Lions split off toward the planetoid below.

* * *

Lance set the Blue Lion down behind a cluster of towering rocks that, upon closer inspection, might have been pure ice. God knew it was cold enough out there. So cold he was deliberately _not_ trying to convert from Altean units to something he could put in context. Coran had assured them all that their armor could withstand the climate on Revinor, just as long as they kept their helmets sealed until they were inside the refinery, where there was (presumably) some kind of central heat.

The comms had cut out entirely on the descent, so Lance couldn’t get in touch with Keith and Matt from the cockpit. They’d landed nearby, and Lance figured it was best not to keep them waiting. Shivering in anticipation of the hike, Lance sealed his helmet, checked his bayard (could he lose it, he wondered, when it was stored as energy in his armor?), and headed down the ramp.

The wind hit him even before he stepped out onto the ice, the force of it nearly knocking him off his feet. He grabbed onto Blue’s teeth to steady himself, then hunched into the wind and stumbled forward.

Maybe it was just Lance’s imagination, but he thought Blue shut her mouth and raised her shield more quickly than usual.

 _Sure,_ he thought, squinting into the icy darkness for signs of his friends. _You stay here all nice and cozy while I do the real work._

Blue rumbled smugly in his head.

The wind carried with it millions of tiny ice crystals and buffeted his helmet with a rapid-fire _tick-a-tick,_ like a very tiny bag of popcorn being popped. Calling it a blizzard would be too nice; this was an ice storm like nothing Lance had ever seen, and it would have made visibility nil even if the distant star, identifiable only as a slightly brighter haze overhead, had given off more light than a full moon.

A flash of light sliced through the darkness. Right. Headlamps. Lance hastily switched his on as a second light joined the first, and both lights swiveled toward him.

“I’d just like to take a moment to reiterate my vacation idea,” Lance said as Keith and Matt approached. “I’m gonna need some sun after this.”

Matt chuckled, but Keith barely seemed to have heard. “Local comms work,” he muttered. “That’s good.”

“But we can’t reach the others,” Matt pointed out. “Allura was right. If we run into trouble, I’m scrapping the mission. No arguments, okay?”

Keith nodded, and Lance put on a show of moaning about it, though in all honesty he thought Allura and Matt were right. This wasn’t the time to take chances.

They set out toward the refineries, using the maps they’d downloaded from Keith’s old computer. GPS (or whatever the Alteans called it) seemed to have been jammed along with ranged communications, so navigation was a challenge. There weren’t exactly landmarks out here, just hills and spires and occasional small cliffs, all made of thick, opaque ice.

The map they had to guide them was a topographic map, which to Lance looked like a tie-dye coloring page waiting to be filled in, but Keith seemed to see some coherent picture in the squiggly lines, and guided them confidently through the storm.

Ten minutes later, the lights of the first refinery loomed up out of the darkness, impossibly close. A massive bubble of still air surrounded the building—and the others behind it, which popped up one after another as they pushed through the storm. The complex looked a little like the oil refineries Lance had seen in textbooks back home—asymmetrical buildings with tall towers and criss-crossing pipes and girders that gave it a chaotic, haphazard sort of look. Black smoke vented through smokestacks, pooled briefly at the top of the invisible bubble like a dark reflection of the ice storm raging outside, then dispersed.

The bubble wasn’t a shield in the typical sense. There was no energy sheen to it, no physical barrier keeping intruders out (or prisoners in.) The guards probably figured it was good sport to let their workers flee into the inhospitable wastelands beyond.

Anger coiled tight in Lance’s gut as he passed through the bubble with the others, but he let his curiosity wash it away.

“So… what is that thing, anyway? How does it work?”

“The HAE?” Keith asked.

Lance blinked at him.

Keith blinked back, and Lance chose to interpret that as embarrassment. “Habitable Area Enclosure,” Keith said. “I don’t know the technical details, but it maintains a programmed climate and atmosphere within a defined radius. Some ships use it to create an artificial atmosphere, but mostly its used by settlements on inhospitable planets to regulate temperature and weather and make sure the air is breathable.”

“Cool,” Matt said. “I wonder how they do it—some kind of nanobots, maybe? They could generate heat and catalyze chemical reactions to change the atmospheric composition. Not sure about the climate though. I never got into meteorology.”

Lance yawned. “Okay, Bill Nye, but can we focus on the mission for a sec?” He elbowed Matt, who chuckled. “I don’t see any security posted outside the buildings.”

“They wouldn’t bother,” Keith said. “What’s out here that would do the prisoners any good? There’ll be sentries watching the workrooms and barracks, and more at the central control room. Beyond that...” He shrugged.

Matt nodded grimly. “Right. Stick to the plan.”

He didn’t have to tell Lance. Lance and Keith had come up with the plan in the first place, with Coran’s help. The biggest danger was the emergency protocols. Kill too many sentries and the climate control would shut down—the whole HAE would shut down, probably. Once that happened, the Galra prisoners would be trapped wherever they were, with whatever sentries were there. There was no traversing that ice storm without protective suits.

The plan was to gather the prisoners in the barracks, where there would be the fewest sentries—hopefully few enough that taking them out wouldn’t cause problems. Hunk had made a few glorified space heaters to keep the barracks warm for a while even if the HAE _did_ turn off.

It wouldn’t do much good for any prisoners caught in the refineries when the emergency protocols kicked in, though, which was why they had to go in quiet and stick to defense and distraction as much as possible.

 _That_ was Lance’s job. Keep the sentries busy while Matt and Keith found the workers and led them back to the relative safety of the barracks.

They headed for the barracks first, to clear out sentries and set up the space heaters. A simple enough task, considering each of the four long, low buildings was guarded by only a single sentry. Keith had been right; with most of the prisoners at the refineries working, there wasn’t much to guard. The paladins took out the robots in seconds and stowed them in the shadows between buildings. Lance and Matt got the heaters running in the first three barracks while Keith did a quick sweep, looking for any Galra who had been left behind—the sick, the elderly, or young children.

“No one’s here,” Keith said when he returned. He sounded troubled, and that made Matt’s expression tighten.

Lance chewed his lip, forcing an optimistic outlook. “Maybe all the prisoners here right now _are_ able to work,” he said. “I mean… there can’t be _that many_ little kids getting sent to prison worlds, right?”

Keith’s grimace was answer enough, but there was nothing to be gained sitting around worrying. As soon as the heaters were set, they headed out for the nearest refinery.

If Lance thought the outside had the look of an erector set put together by six different kids each with a different plan, the inside was even worse. The hallways were cramped and dim, pipes crowding the ceiling like arteries. Humming, clanging sounds filled the air, muffled by distance but still loud enough to make conversation difficult at anything less than a shout.

That was fine, though. Might cover the sound of their escape, at least, even if Lance was having a hard time figuring out where the hell they were supposed to be going.

They turned a corner and emerged onto a catwalk overlooking the refinery floor. There were so many pipes and chutes and chimneys and glass tubes here it looked like a cyberpunk forest, a bed of conveyor belts underfoot. Along the far wall, vats of molten metal glowed red, giving the whole space an ominous atmosphere.

There were so many flashing lights and moving parts dragging Lance’s eyes first one way, then another, that it took him several long moments to realize the gaping hole in their plan.

There were no workers.

Heart sinking, Lance gripped the railing and leaned over, searching for signs of the prisoners. The machinery lumbered on, but there were no Galra watching it, no raw ore coming down the chutes to the conveyor belts, no finished product being sent on from the last station.

The place was entirely deserted.

“So… what now?” Lance asked. “Check the other--?”

“Lance!” Matt shouted. “Get down!”

Before Lance could react, a hand seized his shoulder and pulled him back from the railing, flinging him into the corridor they’d come through just as a hail of laserfire erupted from the side. Matt and Keith summoned their shields just in time to block the deadly barrage.

Okay, so maybe Lance had been a bit hasty with his assessment. The place _wasn’t_ deserted.

Far from it.

Guards—sentries, yes, but also Galra soldiers—approached down the catwalk from either side, guns drawn. Keith and Matt stood back to back between them, inching into the hallway where Keith had shoved Lance. Lance summoned his bayard, remembered the emergency protocols, and traded it for his shield.

“They knew we were coming,” Keith whispered, flinching as a sentry’s laser skimmed past his shield and left a black scorch mark on his armor. “I don’t know how, but they _knew_.”

“But where are the prisoners?” Lance asked.

Matt’s mouth tightened. “We’ll deal with that later. Right now, we need to get out of here before we get killed.”

Reluctantly, Lance nodded. They turned and sprinted back the way they’d come. More soldiers seemed to appear at every turn, and Lance soon lost track of where they were, or where they’d already been. He fell back, running awkwardly, half twisted around to catch laserfire from behind on his shield. Matt took the lead, and Keith fumbled with his gauntlet, trying to bring up the building’s blueprints.

“Left!” Keith shouted, and Matt veered to the side, Keith and Lance behind him. They thundered down a rickety flight of stairs, then out into the icy semi-darkness.

“Don’t stop,” Matt said, grabbing both of the others by the arm. He towed them toward the next refinery.

Once inside, they slammed the door and waited, listening for sounds of pursuit.

“Nothing,” Lance said after a moment. “I don’t think they followed us.”

“Could be more here, though,” Keith said.

Lance shot him an irritated scowl. “Well, _duh_. Come on.” He struck out toward the stairs, and they started the long, head-turning progression toward the central work space in this building.

Matt called them to a halt just before the catwalk, and they crouched together, listening to the silence. There were no voices, and far less noise than Lance would have expected from a refinery running at full capacity. Just a faint whir of gears, and the gas or steam or whatever it was rushing through the pipes overhead.

Gesturing for Lance and Keith to stay where they were, Matt darted out onto the catwalk and peered down at the refinery floor.

“Nothing,” he whispered. “There are no prisoners here, either.”

Lance huffed. “Something about this stinks.”

“Yeah.” Matt cut off with a curse and darted back toward them, laserfire nipping at his heels. “That’s it,” he said, leading the way back toward the exit. “We’re pulling out. We can’t do anything if we don’t know what the hell is going on.”

Lance clenched his jaw, but didn’t argue. He just wanted to know _how_ the guards had known they were coming. Maybe Shiro or Allura would have some idea.

So of course it was at that moment that more solider appeared ahead of them, cutting off their escape route. Matt swore again, and shoved Lance toward a ladder.

“Up,” he said. “We’ll have to work our way around.”

Lance obeyed, unease churning in his gut.

* * *

Things, Pidge decided, were not going well.

They hadn’t seen the exact moment the Galra fleet arrived—sometime between total comms failure and losing track of the others. Pidge had been hovering between Yellow and Black, picking through Green’s systems to locate the source of the interference. They hadn’t been wholly convinced they could find a workaround on such short notice, but it was better than sitting around waiting for an attack that didn’t seem to be coming.

Then the castle-ship’s lasers had lit up the sky, two long, one short.

Pidge had been slowest to respond (due mostly to a last-ditch effort to brute-force the problem, and only _slightly_ because they’d pulled their legs up underneath them to work and therefore had to flail around a bit before they could regain control of their lion.)

The others were already engaged by the time Pidge joined them. Only a single warship, as far as Pidge could see. Not a huge force, though Pidge _was_ wary of the new, boxy-looking ship flanking it.

There were two main problems heading into this battle. One: they couldn’t communicate. Shiro and Hunk were doing fine for now, each of them taking on their own cluster of fighters, but if one of them got into trouble, there would be no way to call for help. The scanners were all offline, too, so there was a very real possibility of collisions—which was all well and good for Hunk, who always headbutted the enemy, anyway, but what if two of their lions ran into each other?

Problem two: the others were still down on Revinor’s surface, and probably had no idea there was a battle going on. The storm over the refinery was thick enough to obscure visuals, so unless they decided to pull out for their own reasons, Voltron—the only thing able to quickly cut through a warship’s shields—was off the table.

That left two options. Leave the warship to Coran and hope the castle’s shields didn’t give out before Pidge and the other paladins cleared out the rabble. Or try the maneuver they’d learned from Jeya, a friend in the Kera rebellion. There was a sweet spot on the warship’s underbelly where a strong enough blast could skim underneath the main shield protecting the weapons, engines, and bridge. If Pidge built up enough power, they could take out the shield generators in a single strike.

It was the fastest option, and probably something Allura would have approved if Pidge had had the chance to ask for permission.

So, ignoring the fact that Allura had specifically said to stay close, Pidge took off for the warship. They spun and wove through the melee, taking more than a few shots on the back, where Green’s shield absorbed the energy, storing it in a special power cell. Pidge usually dumped that power into the Lightning Overkill Instigator, or LOKI (a much better name, in Pidge’s opinion, than the old, “lightning breath doodad”), but this time they saved it up, readying a single, superpowered laser blast to bring the warship to its knees.

But as they broke away from the cloud of fighters to line up their shot, the boxy vessel, which had so far been quiet, moved toward them.

Pidge eyed it critically. No visible weapons. A clunky design that made it slow and hard to maneuver. The bay doors on the bow were grinding open, but so far nothing had emerged.

They could take it out easily once the warship’s shields were down.

Pidge dropped below the warship, pivoted, and took aim. At the edge of their vision, the bay doors had reached their widest point, but still nothing moved inside the boxy ship. Pidge’s thumb hovered over the trigger.

A high pitched grinding sound, like a buzz saw, filled the air. Pidge cried out, hands snapping up to cover their ears on instinct as Green roared her pain and surprise in Pidge’s head. For an instant the world went out of focus, and Pidge wasn’t sure if that was Green, or the auditory ice picks hacking at their brain.

Pain crawled across their hull like lightning, quick and sharp and all-over. Something—many somethings—gnawed at the shield, poking tiny holes in the defenses and slipping through as Green struggled to repair the damage. Many of them were too slow, and the shield caught them, fizzling as it bisected… what? What were they? Too small to see, too small to feel except that there were thousands of them. _Tens_ of thousands.

Pidge’s eyes snapped open. They wrenched the controls to one side and veered away from the warship, trying to outrun the little biting things. Nanobots? Pidge didn’t know, but it was all they could come up with. How did you _fight_ nanobots?

They hastily switched power over from lasers to LOKI and unleashed everything Green had stored up. Lightning filled the viewscreen up with white, and Pidge closed their eyes, looking through Green’s as the electricity raced across the sky. It seemed random at first, like there was nothing to hit, but then something caught like tinder, and gossamer white strands of light sizzled outward in a fine haze.

It cleared, and for a moment there was silence.

Then the nanobots returned and began once more to gnaw at the shields. Pidge gunned the engines, scanning the battle for the sight of their friends, but everywhere was chaos and lasers, and with the nanobots nipping at their tail, Pidge didn’t dare stick around hunting. What would they do even if they found Hunk or Shiro? Pidge couldn’t even see the nanobots. All they were likely to do was spread the problem around like fleas.

Something drifted past their viewscreen, so small and so distant they almost didn’t notice it.

It was a sphere, fist-sized and glowing with red lights. Something in the design reminded them of Rover, but then it flashed and the nanobots concentrated their attacks on Green’s shield generator.

The lion roared in alarm, and Pidge took off as fast as they could push the engines.

It wasn’t fast enough to outrun the nanobots. They kept pace, or maybe they were simply pulled along with Green as she fled. The red-lit sphere drifted once more into view.

“You think that’s what’s controlling these things?” Pidge asked Green.

She growled, and Pidge shrugged.

“You’re right. Safer to destroy it, whatever it is.”

They opened fire, but the sphere dodged aside, and Pidge scowled. Like they were going to let that little homebrew get away. They took off after the core and fired again.

It dodged again, but more narrowly, and flashed a new pattern of lights. The assault on Green’s shields abated. The nanobots turned their attention instead on her lasers.

“So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?” Pidge leaned forward, ready for a challenge. “Get ready to eat laser, HAL.”

* * *

Allura grunted, staggering as a laser hit the Black Lion from behind.

“Now would be a good time to figure out how Matt and Keith did that copiloting thing, huh?” Shiro muttered, guiding Black through a field of combat so thick with lasers it was like diving into a luminous rainforest.

Allura grimaced, arms straining as she clung to the overhead handles. “This is all my fault.”

Shiro was silent. Shock, perhaps, or simple agreement. Allura didn’t blame him. This should have been a simple mission. Allura should have pulled out as soon as the comms started to falter. Instead she’d not only pushed on, but she’d split the team up and left them without their greatest defense.

Now Shiro and Hunk were being battered on all sides by hundreds of fighters and gunships— _far_ more than ordinarily accompanied a lone warship. Coran was locked in battle with the warship itself, and Allura knew the castle well enough to suspect that the shields were already beginning to weaken under the strain of that photon cannon.

And Pidge—Allura hadn’t seen Pidge in more than five minutes. They’d headed off toward the warship, but Shiro’s battle had taken him in another direction, and by the time they turned again, Pidge was nowhere to be seen.

“We should have pulled out when we had the chance. I’m sorry.”

“Princess...”

“Please don’t call me that.”

Shiro jerked a little, like he wanted to turn towards her, but the battle outside demanded his full attention. It was just as well. Allura didn’t want his pity.

“Allura, then,” he said, taking out two fighters with quick, well-aimed shots as he rolled aside. “You don’t need to apologize. You couldn’t have known this would happen.”

“I should have,” she said sharply, angry with herself. A century of training under her father, studying old tactician’s writings, simulating battles, watching and weighing in as King Alfor led the Voltron Guard into battle. “It’s my job to anticipate surprises. That’s why I’m _here_. Quiznak,” she muttered. “And now look at us. Scattered halfway across the system. Cut off. Outmatched.”

If anyone died here today, it was on Allura’s shoulders. She should have stayed on the castle-ship. There was a reason Alfor led from the bridge. Out here in the heat of the moment it was too easy to get caught up in the rush of action, to think herself infallible.

Shiro was quiet for a long moment. The fighters around them were thick enough that his lasers were just as likely to hurt Black as her enemies, so Shiro deployed the jaw blade, cutting through ships as he darted between them.

“With all due respect, your highness, you can’t be the only one responsible for spotting Zarkon’s tricks. I lived with the Galra for a year. I fought in their army. If anyone should have expected this, it’s me.”

Allura’s jaw clenched. “That’s different.”

This time Shiro did turn toward her, his eyes narrowed. Something sideswiped them, and he swore, fighting with the controls to get them steady once more. “No,” he said. “It’s not. They’re my team, too. I’m responsible for their safety just as much as you are, Princess.”

The title grated on Allura’s nerves, and as another hit sent her stumbling against the wall, it was all she could do not to snap at Shiro.

“I understand that,” she said instead, struggling for calm. “And I respect that. But the fact remains—you are young and new to this fight. _I_ have been training for this my entire life. No one expects you to know what you’re doing. No one expects _you_ to be perfect.”

Shocked silence filled up the cockpit, and Allura felt her breath hitch as her words caught up with her. The doubts and short-comings she’d kept buried for so long, the things she’d sworn never to let her paladins see had snuck up on her, tumbling past her defenses before she could think better of what she was saying.

The Black Lion reached out to her, soothing her guilt.

“I-I’m sorry,” Allura said, screwing her eyes shut. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

Shiro was quiet a moment longer, and when he spoke his voice was soft. “I never expected you to be perfect, Allura. I’m sorry if I made it seem that way.”

“Don’t apologize,” she said in a tone that halted Shiro’s argument. “This is war. Someone has to be in charge. Someone has to take responsibility for the failures.”

“Alone?” Shiro asked. “I’ve been there, Allura. I’ve--” He cut off abruptly, reversing sharply as two gunships opened fire directly in his path. Allura lurched against his seat back. “You’re better qualified to lead than any of us,” he said, “but _no one_ can bear that kind of burden alone. Not in a war like this one.”

His words struck a chord in Allura, a long-buried memory from her training, and she laughed at her own folly.

 _Perfectionism,_ her father had once told her, _is a particular stumbling block for black paladins. Their lion demands her pilot to be in control at all times, and so they accept nothing less than their ideal best._

_That, Allura, is why we are here._

“Of course,” she said, shaking her head. Shiro was watching her again, not with his eyes, but with his whole body, keenly aware of her every move. She straightened up and fixed her helmet, which had been knocked askew with the last impact. “You’re right, Shiro, as you so often are.”

Shiro hesitated, clearly confused by her response. “You _are_ a great leader,” he said, testing the air. “I’m not faulting you for any of this.”

Allura smiled. “I know you aren’t. Thank you.”

They reached the edge of this swarm of fighters and broke free into open space, and a chance to breathe. Shiro risked a glance at Allura.

“My father once told me the black paladin has a tendency to put too much pressure on themself. It was my responsibility to share some of that burden.” She paused at a sudden, sympathetic rumble from Black. “I suppose, when she chose me, I forgot that _I_ might need someone to share the burden, as well.”

“Well,” Shiro said wryly. “You’re in good company there.” He paused, turning to unleashed a hail of lasers on the fighters following him.

They had one last instant of relative calm, and for that instant their eyes locked. They needed no words to say what they both were thinking. Two black paladins sharing the burden of leadership, Allura supposed, wasn’t so different from a paladin and a king doing the same.

The chaos of battle crashed down upon them like a wave, but Allura’s eyes were drawn to the rear of the cockpit, where a soft indigo glow had begun to gather. As she watched, twin pedestals like those on the bridge of the castle-ship appeared, topped with gems of the purest black. Flecks like stars and galaxies glimmered within, giving the impression of twin universes that could be held in the palm of her hands.

Allura’s breath caught in her throat, and Shiro, without turning, let out a curse on a breath of air.

Hardly noticing the battle outside, or the lasers that still rattled the cockpit, Allura stepped up to the pedestals, hesitated only a moment, and settled her hands into place.

At once her mind expanded. It was very much like the first time she’d performed Leifor’s Dive and looked through the eyes of her lion—only this time her mind seemed to stretch further. _Much_ further. Shiro’s mind, shocked, quiet with wonder, was swept up in the motion, and for a moment they looked down on the whole battle. The Black Lion, eyes flashing fever-bright as she cut down Galra fighters. Yellow nearby, limping but not yet downed, Hunk’s mind spinning frantic circles within her.

More distant was the Green Lion, and Pidge, both of them pained and frightened in the center of a hazy threat neither Allura nor Shiro could see clearly. Green’s eyes had gone dark, her shields were down, and both she and her paladin floated motionless in empty space.

Motionless—except for the furious activity of Pidge’s fingers, flying across a keyboard.

Down on the surface of Revinor were three more minds, some way distant from their lions. Allura caught a flash--

Laserfire.

Running, breath labored, fear and confusion. They’d been running, running for so long, and the guards were closing in on them from all sides, sentries and Galra alike cutting off every path to escape. Shields could only get them so far. They’d drawn their weapons, though they still hesitated to use them. The emergency protocols hung over all three paladins like a fog—but if they didn’t fight, they were going to be cut down themselves, and then the prisoners would surely die all the same.

The prisoners… _Where_ were the prisoners?

A Galra stood in Keith’s path, gun raised. Not slowing his desperate pace, Keith raised his sword to cut the man down.

Fear flashed across the soldier’s face. He didn’t shoot.

Understanding ignited within Keith, and knowledge flooded Allura at the same moment Keith spoke aloud for Matt and Lance to hear.

“They’re— _vrekt!_ ” he cried, twisting his blade at the last instant so that it missed his opponent by inches. “They’ve dressed the prisoners up as soldiers!”

Allura blinked, her mind stretching in all directions at once. It tangled with Shiro’s, and they came to a decision without pausing to deliberate. Shiro’s mind settled halfway back into his body in the Black Lion, thin offshoots reaching out for Hunk and Pidge. Allura left only a sliver of herself in the air, an anchor grounding her in Shiro, and returned her full attention to the battle raging within the refinery.

Keith’s words had stopped Lance in his tracks, his rifle still pointed at one of the soldiers— _prisoners—_ as horror washed over him.

“What?” Matt hissed. “Are you sure?”

Allura reached out with her mind to each of the three, sensing their confusion, their horror. Keith was the only one who had yet pieced it together—Galra armed with rifles that hadn’t been fired, even once, since the chase began. Only the sentries were attacking. Fear and resignation darkened every face.

Then Keith drew in an audible breath. “ _Allura_?”

In his shock, he lowered his shield, and a sentry’s next shot took him in the shoulder. He stumbled, and Lance caught his arm, pulling them both behind his shield as Matt stepped in front of Keith to guard against a follow-up attack.

Allura cringed, trying to communicate her apology. They seemed unable to sense her as clearly as she could sense them, as though they were aware of her presence, but only dimly.

Lance shuddered, a dozen questions bubbling up inside him.

“Not now,” Allura said.

Lance stopped, then frowned. He opened his mouth again, confusion roiling inside him. Closed it.

So they _could_ hear her. Not well, perhaps not in words, but they sensed her intent. That would make things more difficult, but she would manage.

* * *

Pidge sat cross-legged in the pilot’s seat, buzzsaw whirring all around. Their eye twitched, but they hunched lower over the computer, pouring all their energy into a last, desperate attempt to hack the softball-sized computer core floating at the center of the cloud of nanobots. Their shields were down, their weapons, too. The engines might still limp along, but to what end? They were dead unless they could shut this swarm down.

Shiro saw this with half a mind, superimposed with the image of Hunk, furiously working at the controls of the Yellow Lion, trying to redirect her power toward the most critical systems to keep her in the air. He did all this while flying, drunkenly, with one hand. Lasers chased him from behind.

The rest of Shiro’s mind was bent on his own Lion, and Allura’s thin-stretched presence behind him. He broke away from the fighters hounding him and sped toward Hunk, reaching out to both him and Pidge.

Both teens sat up ramrod straight as his arrival, confusion swirling around them. Shiro had no time for explanations, just tried to exude a sense of reassurance as he spotted Yellow ahead of him and began to pick off the fighters on her tail.

He had a plan, but that plan depended on Hunk.

 _Hold tight, Pidge,_ Shiro thought. _We’ll be there soon._

* * *

There had to be a reason.

Allura followed the paladins on the ground with her mind, watching their slow retreat through the refinery. They’d dismissed their weapons once more, huddling behind their shields as the sentries continued their assault. The hallways were just as crowded as before, but the press of bodies was less alarming now that they’d seen that three quarters of those present meant them no harm.

Still they proceeded with caution, unwilling to risk any of the prisoners getting hurt in the crossfire. With renewed determination, they pressed onward and downward, making steady progress toward the exit.

Mostly, though, Allura turned over the problem. The prisoners were playacting at soldiers—not attacking, but standing, armed, in line with the sentries, though they had to know it was likely to get them killed. _Why?_ Surely it would have been safer to tell the paladins the truth, the risk of retaliation notwithstanding. The odds of the paladins killing them in self defense had to be higher.

_Unless it’s not their own lives their worried about._

The words came from Shiro, or at least in Shiro’s voice. It was difficult to pin down the exact boundary between their minds, and the words had come from the gray area where thoughts intermingled freely.

Whoever had thought it first, they were right. It only made sense. Allura examined the situation again, gleaning the surface-level thoughts from the other three paladins. The empty barracks, where those unfit for work should have been resting. Even if there were no ill prisoners at the moment, even if they all died before reaching old age, Keith had said they sent children here. He’d known several himself, classmates of his who had not been able to make themselves fight with the bloodthirstiness expected of a Galra.

That had been years ago, but the instructors had always gathered up those who failed the end-of-year exams to ship them off to Revinor. Even if those Keith had known were grown now, there should have been others who had arrived since. So if the children weren’t in the barracks, and they weren’t among the fake guards…

“The control tower,” Allura said. She remembered it from the blueprints they’d found. A tower, well-guarded, accessible only with the codes stored in the sentries’ memory banks. Of course, most kinds of security could be bypassed with the proper application of force.

Allura began considering how best to communicate her plan to the paladins, but they were already moving, sprinting the last few turns to the exit, then angling across the bare ice toward the tower. Allura hoped she’d figured right; if the children were inside, then the battle would soon be over.

If not, then Allura could be leading her team straight into another trap.

* * *

 _Divide and conquer_ , Shiro thought, his own voice echoed by one he only recognized through Allura. Her father, King Alfor.

It was the best strategy. The nanobots were focused on Pidge now, but if one of the other lions came in, drew some of them off, the swarm would be stretched thin. The core would have fewer helpers around to protect itself.

That still left the matter of how to hit it, given how fast it was, but Black rumbled reassurances in Shiro’s mind. _Don’t worry about that._

Shiro listened, and turned his mind to other problems. He’d managed to clear out most of the fighters around Hunk now, and sent him off with a tacit command to draw the nanobots off Pidge. Shiro wasn’t sure how much of it Hunk understood, but he took off obediently, skimming near the Green Lion and then taking off in another direction, nanobots swarming around him.

As Hunk did this, Shiro glanced at the castle-ship, shields flashing red in warning. He told Pidge to forget the core and try to hack the warship’s shields.

Pidge hesitated.

They’d considered hacking a warship before, but it would probably require the kind of authorization they hadn’t yet figured out how to fake.

They tried anyway, and Shiro closed in on the nanobot core, which saw him coming and darted away. Shiro squeezed the trigger.

The Black Lion’s mouth opened, but no laser fired. Instead, something rippled across the viewscreen display like a mirage, and the core stopped dead. It’s little engines flared white, but still it began to slide backwards, drawn toward the Black Lion’s mouth by an irresistible pull.

Seconds later, the core tumbled into Black’s mouth. She bit down, released a measured pulse of laserfire, and the core disintegrated. The nanobots assaulting Hunk and Pidge fell away, as dead as the core that had controlled them, and the comms flickered back to life.

“Pidge,” Shiro barked. “If Keith accesses the network from the ground, can you get past any restrictions Zarkon might have placed on his credentials and use them to hack the shields?”

Pidge, to their credit, hardly missed a beat. “Probably, yeah. When--?”

“Now,” Shiro said. Allura had already relayed the plan to Keith, who’d made it to the control tower with the others. Shiro had been tracking their progress in the back of his mind, and as he turned his attention their way now, he saw that they’d briefly paused their search for the missing Galra children to access the network. Together with Pidge, they had the warship’s shields down in seconds.

“Thanks for that,” Coran called, even as he opened fire on the warship with everything he had. “Quick thinking, too. I’m impressed.”

Shiro smiled, and felt Allura do the same behind him. “You have no idea.”

* * *

Lance took a deep breath, pausing outside the door to the main control room, Keith and Matt behind him. With the comms back on and the battle in orbit all but over, Pidge and Coran were running ops for the ground team, and they’d tracked the vital signatures to this room.

“There are Galra soldiers in there,” Pidge warned, having hacked the cameras. “Real ones this time. Three of them, and they’re waiting for you. The sentries are watching the kids.”

“You have the control beacon?” Keith asked.

Pidge’s grin was audible in their voice. “Thanks to the gracious approval of our very own Galra prince I do.”

Keith made a face. “ _Don’t_ call me that.”

“Whatever you say, your highness.”

Keith growled, and Matt did his best to smother a laugh. “Save it for later, Pidge. Ready to shut this place down?”

“Just say the word.”

Matt gave the count, and Pidge deactivated the sentries—careful not to trip the emergency protocols as they did so. There came a series of thumps on the far side of the door, accompanied by shouts of confusion.

While the soldiers were distracted, Keith hit the lock. The door hissed open on three very confused, very angry Galra soldiers. Keith broke left, Matt right, and Lance shot the soldier at the back of the room, watching him fall without the slightest twinge of guilt.

Sometimes, he thought, the right choice was obvious.

He dismissed his bayard as soon as he was certain no threats remained, then crossed to the dozen or so children huddled by the far wall, small and shaking and wide-eyed. He wasn’t sure how closely Galra development lined up with human, but these kids all looked younger than twelve, some only eight or nine. They could have been Luz or Mateo, any one of them. The thought made Lance sick.

He pulled off his helmet and crouched a few feet from the children, holding his hands out, palms up, to show he was unarmed.

“It’s okay,” he said in a soft voice. “We’re here to help.”

One of the younger boys burst into tears, and Lance inched forward, watching the others for signs of panic. They remained wary, but allowed Lance to reach out to the crying boy and pull him into a hug.

“It’s okay,” Lance whispered, voice thick with emotion. “It’s over now. It’s over.”

* * *

An hour later they left Revinor behind, one hundred and forty-seven freed Galra workers aboard the castle-ship. Many of them were still in shock, but they thanked the paladins profusely—especially the ones who now had children clinging to their waists. Relatives were not sent to the same prisons, Lance discovered, but the workers had forged their own families.

With a pang of empathy, Lance glanced at the others—Shay hovering over Hunk as she tried to spread some sort of cream over a cut on his forehead, Pidge pressing Keith’s hand to a scanner and babbling about species-encrypted locks _,_ Matt practically jumping on Shiro and Allura to ask for details of… whatever it was they’d done. Shiro looked dazed, Allura giddy, and when she threw her arms around Shiro’s neck, the force of it nearly knocked him over. Matt laughed and steadied them both.

“All right, Lance?” Coran asked, breaking away from the Galra to join him at the edge of the large banquet hall-like room they’d all gathered in. Coran had taken on the task of figuring out which of the freed prisoners wanted to be dropped off and where. Many of them, from the sounds of it, _had_ nowhere to go.

“Fine,” Lance said. “So what’s the word? We getting some new permanent residents in the Castle of Lions?”

Coran smiled. “Yes indeed. About two dozen so far, mostly the children and the ones attached to them. Some of the others are undecided at the moment.”

“Seems fair enough, after all they’ve been through.” Lance stretched, trying to work out the knot in his chest. It was an uncomfortable, unfamiliar weight, a ball of nerves that hadn’t left with the end of the battle. “That… was pretty dodgy for a while back there,” he said slowly.

Coran clasped his hands behind his back. “We pulled through all right.”

“Only because of Shiro and Allura.” Lance paused, smiling as two of the children started up a game of tag. They quickly attracted a small crowd and ran, screeching, through the more somber adults. “I pushed for this, Coran. It was _my_ plan, and it almost got us killed. Almost got all the prisoners killed, too.”

A young girl, wearing a pink jacket from the castle’s stores over her prison jumpsuit, tried twice to tag some of her fellow players. When she fell short on the third attempt, she slowed, pouting. Her eyes scanned the room, then brightened, and she grinned a Mateo sort of grin, devious and determined.

She turned, sprinted across the room, and tapped Keith on the back. “ _Gatta!_ ” she cried—the Galran equivalent of _you’re it_.

Keith turned, blinked, then took off in pursuit of the girl, a lopsided grin on his face. She shrieked in delight, and Lance couldn’t help but smile.

He turned to Coran. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy with how it turned out. I just… wish I’d seen it coming.”

Coran stroked his mustache. “You know, back on Altea we had a game called _eshet_. It’s a strategy game, supposed to teach you to how to out-think an opponent. Fun, too. I used to trounce Zarkon all the time—until he stopped playing against me. Said I was cheating.”

“Were you?”

Coran grinned. “There’s no such thing as cheating in _eshet._ That’s the whole fun of it.” He paused, eying Lance. “I could teach you, if you like.”

Across the room, Keith succeeded in tagging one of the kids—not the girl who’d tagged him, but a boy who looked closer to twelve. As soon as he did, though, the game changed. Instead of tag, they now seemed intent on seeing just how many hyperactive young Galra Keith could support before his legs gave out.

(The answer, as it happened, was a thoroughly underwhelming four, though Lance would admit having number five pounce on your head from the shoulders of a sympathetic adult was a bit of a disadvantage.)

Lance turned back to Coran, smiling. “I think I’d like that.”


	8. Earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Val Mendoza was caught snooping on Garrison property more than two weeks ago, and she hasn't been seen since. Karen Holt, Eli Kahale, and Akira Shirogane are searching for her, as well as for the missing cadets, but they're making slow progress. Akira fears his investigations may have caught Iverson's eye. Eli told Karen he thought it might be time for her tell her family's story. But first, Karen wants to try a different tactic...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Minor panic attack that leads to (accidental) misgendering. To skip, stop reading at "The next day, Karen was alive with anticipation" and resume at "'I'm here to see Commander Iverson.'"

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1433  
>  Dated six months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Notes on subject 5Nn; prisoner ID 118-9875 [Pidge’s note: Matt]; a summary. (See log entries 1349-1432 for complete observations.)
> 
> \--5Nn has been in total Quintessential deprivation for a total of ninety solar cycles with minimal effects.
> 
> \--Muscular atrophy and expected weight loss observed due to confinement and liquid diet.
> 
> \--No paralytic agents were used due to low baseline stress response and lack of feral symptoms during trial.
> 
> \--Physical health remains within acceptable limits; very slight decrease in brain activity detected, but this may be attributable to lack of sensory input and physical activity in the long term, rather than being a direct result of Quintessential deprivation. Stress hormones remain elevated but markedly lower than projected level for a feral type of 5Nn’s baseline vitals.
> 
> \--At 5 solar cycles (75% fatality across all subjects), 5Nn exhibited no marked change from the first cycle.
> 
> \--At 10 cycles (99% fatality for non-feral species), subject was designated novel-type and his classification updated to 5Nn. Further observation requested.
> 
> \--5Nn’s health and brain activity was monitored for an additional 80 solar cycles with only minor changes recorded by monitors in the chamber. Lead researcher Vorukt submitted a request for use of the other two human prisoners, but this request was denied.
> 
> 5Nn was removed from the chamber today, replaced with Subject 5Q. Vorukt believes 5Nn will provide more useful insight if targeted trials are undertaken. Second phase protocols are detailed in the Research Protocol directory and will begin tomorrow.

* * *

Val Mendoza jerked out of a dark dream, kicking the wall hard enough to bruise her heel. She swore, clutched at her bare foot, and sighed. So much for feigning sleep.

The act, in all honesty, probably wasn’t necessary. It was only ever prisoners in here—a few humans, a surprising number of other species. Real live aliens. _Aliens_! Val didn’t know whether to be giddy with the discovery, or terrified.

Regardless, it was obvious the other prisoners meant her no harm. Most of them barely seemed aware of their surroundings. They were confined three or four to a cell, which seemed awfully generous considering how large the cells were. Not five star resorts, by any means, but as big as a conference room back at the paper. If the aliens’ stories were to be believed, most other Galra prisons would pack _ten_ prisoners in a cell this size.

Oh, right. The Galra. Val shivered, adding another mark with a little stub of stone to her tally on the wall. She wasn’t entirely sure it was accurate, but it was the only way to keep track of time here. She counted twelve days since she first woke up in this cell. She’d only seen their Galra guards twice in that time, but she’d heard more than enough stories.

Twelve days. She’d wasted enough time already.

The other prisoners in her cell—a man named Luis from Mississippi and Yir, who was little more than a bedraggled fluffball with sharp teeth and eyes like glowing coals—eyed her warily. Val wouldn’t exactly call them friends. She felt a certain kinship with them on the basis of them all being prisoners, but they didn’t talk much.

That was deliberate. Val had a plan, and if it went south, she didn’t want Luis or Yir getting caught up in it.

The other cells Val could see across the way from hers, all of them fronted by steel doors with a foot-tall barred slit across them at eye height, were as quiet as her own. The Galra had their prisoners well-trained. The two times Val had seen her captors, it had been when one of the prisoners was “causing a disturbance” (Galra for “crying hysterically because they’d just been abducted by aliens.”) The Galra had come and hauled the offending prisoner away. It was the only time any of them left the cells.

Val walked to the far side of the cell, pivoted, and kicked the door with the ball of her foot. It gave a satisfying _clang_ that made her cellmates jump and try to shush her, but Val was sick of sitting around waiting to die. She kicked again, ignoring the ache that came from kicking solid steel with a bare foot.

“Hey!” she shouted, voice cracking from disuse. “ _Hey!_ Galra shitheads! _Hijos de puta!_ Get your furry asses in here!”

“What are you _doing_?” Luis hissed. “You’re going to get us all killed.”

Val kicked the door one more time, and that finally triggered some activity outside the cell block. She smiled at Luis as the guards came tromping in. “Nope,” she said, lifting one shoulder in an apologetic shrug. “Just me.”

“Who was that?” one of the guards demanded, smacking the bars of the nearest slit with an electrified baton. “Who’s shouting?”

Val grabbed the bars of her own cell and craned her neck to get a look at the guards. “Oh, good, you heard me.” She smiled, wide and charming. “Hi, that was me. Got a sec?”

The guards closed in on her, and she heard her cellmates press themselves against the far wall, no doubt trying to look inconspicuous. The guard with the baton lashed out for her hands, and Val wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid a sharp rap that left her hand tingling.

“Ow!” She shook her hand out, curtailing a string of curse words that would have turned the guard’s fur white. “Jeez, I was just asking.”

“Prisoners don’t get to make requests,” one of the other guards snapped.

Val rolled her eyes. “Look, just take me to your leader or whatever, all right? He’s going to want to talk to me.”

That won a few scoffs from the guards, who looked like they’d just been told a goldfish was going to compete in Olympic beach volleyball. They made no move to open the cell door. In fact, several of them had already turned back the way they came.

Val kicked the door again. “ _Hey._ I’m sick of rotting in here, jackasses, so just let me out already.” Another kick. “I can keep this up all day, you know.”

A lie, but a sufficiently annoying prospect that the head guard stopped in his tracks. He turned, glared at her. “Fine,” he growled. “If you’re so _bored_ in there, I’m sure we can find something for you to do.”

Val tried to look nervous—but not _too_ nervous. Enough to make the guard gloat over his threat, but not enough that he would expect her to panic and make a break for it. And she wasn’t _going_ to run. Not unless the cosmos all aligned to give her the perfect shot. She just needed to get out of this damn cell and see what her situation was.

The lock beeped, the door slid open, and two of the guards dragged her out of the cell while another aimed a gun at Luis and Yir, in case they proved as reckless as Val.

They didn’t move.

In short order, the cell was once more closed and locked, and Val found herself being marched out of the cell block at gunpoint. That was fine. The others who’d been hauled away had come back only minorly bloodied; she’d be _fine_. She told her racing heart to cool it and turned her attention to the halls around her, eyes open for a way out of here.

Information, she knew, was the one commodity even a prisoner could barter in.

* * *

Akira didn’t make it to Karen’s house until late Friday night. It was just too risky to leave during the week. But on Fridays, half the faculty went into Carlsbad for drinks, fries, and trivia at a local sports bar, so Akira could tag along without drawing too much suspicion. He’d waited until Clara had said her goodnights and headed off to her girlfriend’s house, until a more-than-tipsy Harris had stumbled out with a pretty blonde he’d met. Then he finished out the round, handed a ten to Lee, who was in charge of the bill, and said his goodbyes.

“Lightweight!” Emily Jules accused.

Akira held up his hands. “Sorry, sorry. I promised my girlfriend I’d come by after trivia.” Someone muttered something about Akira being whipped that made Akira scowl and glare at the cluster of drunken petty officers where the voice had come from. “Hey, I’d rather be with her than you dicks,” he said, remembering at the last second to lighten his voice so he could pass it off as a joke.

It was almost the truth, in any case. Karen Holt might not be his girlfriend (closer to a self-appointed second mom, really), but he _did_ prefer her company to anyone at the Garrison.

Grabbing his jacket from the back of his chair, Akira waved a farewell and headed for the door. Twenty minutes later, he pulled up outside the Holts’ house and let himself in.

It was nearly midnight, but Karen and Eli were both still up, and they turned to greet him with tired smiles.

“Hey there, stranger,” Eli said through a yawn. “Hungry? I’ve got leftovers in the fridge.”

Akira raised a hand to stop him before he could run off. “Just came from trivia night,” he said. “I ate ten bucks worth of fries.”

Karen frowned. “You call that dinner?”

Grinning, Akira tossed his coat over the bannister and came to lean against the back of the couch. The laptop sitting on Eli’s lap was the only illumination in the room, and it cast both their faces in a ghostly blue light. “Better than what they feed us in the commissary. What are you two working on so late?”

Karen glanced at her watch, frowning, and cursed. “I thought you were planning on coming at a decent hour,” she said, a faint accusation in her voice.

“I was. Didn’t realize what a production trivia night was.” He rubbed the back of his neck and scanned the screen. “Isn’t that your blog, Eli?”

Eli nodded. “I’ve managed to gather a decent following, so we’re thinking it’s time for the next step.”

“Wait.” Karen turned sideways on the couch to look up at Akira. “Before we get into that, I want to know more about whatever this thing with Iverson is.”

“I’ve already told you basically everything,” he said. “He stopped me after one of my classes to ask some weird questions—how the students were doing, why I’d decided to apply for the position. He tried to pass it off as my thirty day review, but I’m telling you, something about the whole thing felt… _weird_.”

Karen and Eli traded glances.

With a frown, Akira climbed over the couch and sat on the arm next to Eli. “It’s probably nothing,” he said, hoping he sounded more casual than he felt. “But I figured it’s still safer to cut back on our meetings. I can use trivia night as a cover—I won’t be the only one spending the night in town afterwards.”

“Fine.” Karen didn’t look happy about it, but she seemed to trust Akira’s judgment. “That might change our plan, though.”

“What plan?”

Eli glanced at Karen, who was staring at the computer screen, rubbing her forehead like she had a headache. Before Akira could chide her about staying up past her bedtime, Eli spoke.

“We’re going to confront Iverson.”

Akira’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh? About what?”

“Val.”

“I thought we didn’t have anything solid on that case.”

“We don’t,” said Karen. “I’d rather take this to the police, but there’s no way they’d take it seriously.” She sighed, folding her hands in her lap. “Iverson cleaned up too well. I doubt you’re going to find anything more solid than you already have.”

“Even if you do, you’ll probably vanish the same way Val did,” Eli said. He muttered something under his breath and clicked over to a different tab. “That’s why we’re trying something else.”

Akira leaned forward, skimming the new webpage. “A live stream?”

Karen’s lips made a thin line across her face, but she nodded. “Eli thinks we should go public. So we’re going to back Iverson into a corner.”

From the frown Eli wore, this wasn’t exactly the plan he’d suggested, but he didn’t call her on it. “If we do this, it’s basically going to confirm for Iverson that we have someone on the inside.” He glanced up at Akira. “If he already suspects you...”

“Do it.”

The were both looking at him, and Akira checked his expression, covering up the thrill of fear Eli’s words had triggered. The last thing Akira wanted was to give Iverson more reason to distrust him, but they _needed_ to make progress. The Garrison didn’t sit on anything for long. If they had Val, if they had the cadets, every day Akira and his friends spent twiddling their thumbs drastically reduced the odds that anyone would be found alive.

He met Eli’s eyes, then turned to Karen, who was watching him hawkishly. “Do it,” he repeated. “I can take care of myself. If you think you can get something out of Iverson, go for it. When were you planning on confronting him?”

“A few days,” Eli said. “Wanted to run it by you first.”

“Can you do it tomorrow?”

Eli frowned. “Technically, yes. But--”

“ _Tomorrow_. We can’t afford to waste any more time. And actually...” Akira leaned back, his mind working. “Yeah. We can do this. Do you have some paper?”

Karen pointed to the desk against the wall. Last time Akira was here, it had been an ordinary computer desk, neat and clear of clutter; now it was buried under a mountain of binder-clipped papers and books with battered covers. Akira dug until he found a blank notepad, then scribbled out a list of references, each with a short explanation.

He tore off the page and handed it to Karen. “In case Iverson tries to slither out of your questions.”

Karen scanned the list, smiling. “Thank you, Akira. I’m sure I can put this to good use.”

* * *

The next day, Karen was alive with anticipation. It was the feeling she got before a trial, the buzz of nerves translated into a fierce, unapologetic productiveness. They’d agreed to give Akira time to get back on campus and melt into the background before they started their assault. They’d be putting him in enough danger as it was without walking through the gates hand-in-hand.

Karen spent the morning organizing papers and rehearsing the cross-examination. That was how she had to sell it to herself, or else she might have realized the sheer audacity of their plan. A lawyer and a freelance cameraman trying to force a pseudo-military organization to confess to murder live on camera.

A laugh, slightly hysterical, bubbled out of her somewhere around her fifth mental run-through of the confrontation. Karen wanted to make sure she had the order down right. She had to keep the pressure on. Relent for even a second and Iverson would wiggle out.

Fail, and everyone she was trying to help was as good as dead. If they weren’t already.

What the _hell_ were they doing here?

Eli, who had been sitting at the desk graciously pretending not to notice Karen pacing and muttering to herself for the last hour, gave up on—what? Checking the livestream settings? Drumming up more interest for the blog? Embedding the feed in yet another dummy site?

He pushed the chair back, planted himself directly in Karen’s path, and grabbed her by the arms to stop her.

“You’re panicking.”

She scoffed. “I am _not_. I always practice before a trial.”

Eli arched an eyebrow. “Fair enough. I’m sure you pace, too.” She didn’t. Not usually. But this situation warranted a little nervous energy, she thought. “But don’t try to tell me your pre-trial ritual includes full-blown panic attacks.”

“I’m _not_ \--”

“Hunk had anxiety.” Eli’s breath caught, and he screwed his eyes shut. “ _Has_ anxiety.” He breathed out, heavy and deliberate, and met Karen’s eyes. “I know what a panic attack looks like, Karen. You need to breathe. Can you do that for me? Put your notes down. Stop thinking about all of that for a second, okay?”

Karen breathed once, quick and shallow. “I _can’t_. If I screw this up--”

“You won’t.”

"But if I do--”

“Then we’ll figure something else out.” Eli eased the stack of papers she’d been flipping through out of her hand and set it aside. “We can still go public with your story,” he reminded her. “Akira can keep looking behind Iverson’s back.”

Karen shook her head, a thousand doubts pounding behind her eyes. The cost of a failure in this plan. The probable consequences of her inaction these last several weeks.

What was she even _doing_? She was a lawyer, not a private investigator. They should have turned this over to the police.

Except she knew full well she didn’t have a single shred of evidence that would convince the cops to give Val’s disappearance the time of day. If Karen was lucky, they’d think she’d run away, maybe interview her coworkers. Her family.

Iverson would never be so much as a person of interest on the case, any more than he would ever be connected to the training accident in the New Mexico desert.

“I shouldn’t have let her go.” The words escaped between one headlong rush of blood and the next, and Karen’s throat sealed behind them, tight with emotion and with guilt.

Eli sighed. “You know Val. You couldn’t have stopped her.”

The guilt intensified. She hadn’t been thinking of Val.

_Mom… Would you mind not… Not calling me your little girl anymore?_

Karen pressed her hands to her face, her nerves drowned out in a sea of guilt and grief. She hadn’t slipped on pronouns in so long, not since she’d finally realized what it was Pidge was asking. What they were objecting too. Not _little_ , but _girl_.

That had been just a few short months ago, during a phone call late at night. Karen had hardly been paying attention, and it had taken two more weeks of awkward pauses and low, uncomfortable noises before Karen picked up on the signs.

 _I will always be your mother,_ Karen had said, when they’d finally talked. It had been a torrent of tears and stuttered, half-formed explanations and a slow realization that Karen really _did_ want to get it right.

There had been a long pause, Pidge’s breathing loud and uneven over the phone line. _I don’t know what’s right, Mom,_ they’d admitted. _I just know that everyone here calls me Mr. Gunderson and I hate it, and then I call you and it’s Katie and I don’t like_ that _either. I just… I don’t want to have to pretend anymore._

“I let _them_ go,” Karen said, and she didn’t know if the words were meant for her or Eli or Pidge _._ “I’m their _mother_ , and I _helped_ them sneak into the Garrison, and now they’re _dead_.”

“You were just trying to support them,” Eli said. His voice sounded a long way off, though he hovered near Karen, one hand gripping her wrist, the other pressed against her back.

Karen laughed, clenching her jaw so Eli wouldn’t see that it was quivering with a scarcely-contained sob. “I’m always _supporting_. Sam offered to quit his job after Matt was born—did you know that? He spent eight months at the ISS when Matt was a baby, and he felt horrible about it, but I knew he still had half his heart in space, so I told him to stay on.

“And Matt! He always said he was going to be an astronaut like his dad, and I wanted him to stay on the ground. I knew it was selfish, but I couldn’t help it. But I told him to _follow his dreams_ , to _give it his all._  And then I forged a damn birth certificate for Pidge so they could chase after the two of them. Now it’s just me sitting here, wondering how it is that after twenty five years of doing my best to support my family they’ve all wound up dead.”

She stopped abruptly, her words ringing in her ears. Karen had never been one for self-pity, and yet there she was. Whining about the past when there were more important things to be doing.

Eli opened his mouth to dole out more comforting words, but Karen pulled away before he could start. “I’m sorry,” she said, standing. “I’m fine. That was--” She stopped, breathed in. Gave Eli a resolute smile. “It’s been long enough, don’t you think? We should get the equipment together.”

She headed for the bathroom, splashing water on her face in the hopes that the shock of cold would chase the tears away. Eli lingered in the hall, watchful but silent, as Karen fixed her makeup with shaking hands, and when she frowned at him in the mirror, he trailed away to gather his camera, his Macbook, and the mobile hotspot he’d purchased back when he sold footage to the local news. He’d go out to film a story, upload the footage to his partner in the city, and she’d sell it to the news stations before any other freelancers could make their bid.

Ten minutes later Karen emerged, feeling less frazzled, though still worn thin. The nerves had gone, at least, and all that remained was cold determination. Her family _was_ alive. Val _was alive._ Karen refused to believe otherwise unless she saw the bodies for herself.

Until then, she would repay Iverson ten times the hell he’d given her.

* * *

“I’m here to see Commander Iverson.”

A young man sat behind the front desk at the Garrison’s public entrance, frowning at Karen. He caught sight of Eli behind her, his predator’s smile nearly hidden behind his camera. A cord trailed out the door, down the front steps, and through the cracked passenger side window to the computer and hotspot, already streaming.

The soldier’s eyes narrowed. He turned back to Karen and spoke in a clipped tone. “Do you have an appointment?”

Karen smiled her courtroom smile. “No, but he’ll want to see me. Tell him Karen Holt is here to talk about the disappearance of Alba Valeria Mendoza.”

If the young man knew what Karen was talking about, he did an admirable job of hiding it. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the Commander is very busy. Are you a member of Ms. Mendoza’s family? If you tell me where she was stationed, I can put you in touch with the public liaison for her unit.”

“She’s not a soldier.” Karen clasped her hands behind her back, counting the seconds off as possibilities ran through the young man’s head. Not a soldier—a cadet? But surely he’d have heard of _another_ disappearance. He frowned, ever so slightly, and Karen pressed the advantage. “I’m sorry, did I say disappearance? Perhaps I should have been clearer. I’m here to talk to Iverson about the kidnapping and possible murder of Val Mendoza.”

That chipped the young man’s composure, though only marginally. He’d frozen, halfway out of his seat, his eyes flickering toward the camera. “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but the Garrison is not a law enforcement agency. If you would like to report a missing person, I would recommend--”

Karen took a single step forward, and the soldier faltered. Karen continued, nonplussed, her heels clicking on the linoleum floor. She felt like a knight in full armor, invulnerable behind her navy pantsuit and painted-on face, the eyes of the internet (as few or as many as that might be) watching her every move.

At the desk, she leaned forward, splaying one hand across the varnished surface, and stage-whispered, “All matters of alleged criminal liability shall be redirected to the acting commander on site,” she quoted—one of the codes from Akira’s list—and smiled thinly as the man paled. “Now be a dear and go fetch Iverson for me.”

The man hesitated only a moment longer before he bolted, remembering his composure too late to make a convincing show. Karen straightened and clutched her purse in a white-knuckle grip, trying to look calm for the camera. Eli remained silent behind her, and she dared not glance at him. She needed to focus.

Iverson appeared at the door within a few minutes, glowering and slightly out of breath, as though he’d sprinted over when he heard what Karen wanted. Karen would have to remember to thank Akira when she got the chance.

“Commander Iverson,” Karen said pleasantly. The young man who had been at the desk when they arrived lingered in the door behind Iverson until Iverson chased him off with a sour glare.

Iverson soon turned his glare on Eli. “Check the visitor pamphlet, ma’am. No cameras allowed on Garrison property.”

Karen held up a finger as a sign of polite contention. “Actually, Commander, I _have_ read the pamphlet. You might recall my husband and son both studied and later worked here. I visited them quite often, and I assure you I am well aware of your policies. Cameras are not allowed in those regions of the campus not open to the general public. However, by the definition laid out in that selfsame visitor’s pamphlet, this--” She paused here to gesture around the lobby, with its plasticy fake plants, dusty old photos on the walls, and dingy white ceiling tiles “--is _not_ considered a restricted part of the grounds, and as such, you have no reason to object to Eli recording this interview.”

“Fine.” Iverson turned on his heel. “Then the interview is over. I suggest you get off the grounds—restricted or otherwise—before I have to call someone to escort you.”

“This was a courtesy call, Iverson.” Karen waited for Iverson to stop before she went on. “We’ve already reached out to the police. Just thought you might want a chance to clear things up before the state shuts down your school. We _are_ dealing with the safety of, what, a couple hundred minors here at your academy? I’m sure you’ll agree their safety comes first.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees as Iverson turned, all pretense gone from his face. “Now see here, _Ms._ Holt. I don’t know what it is you’re insinuating--”

“Oh, I’m not insinuating anything, Commander. I’m saying it straight out. Val Mendoza was last seen on Garrison property eighteen days ago. I don’t know if she’s dead or not, but until you give me reason to believe otherwise, I have to assume someone on your staff was responsible for her disappearance.”

She waited, stone-faced, as Iverson tried some of the alpha male posturing he was so good at. When Karen didn’t immediately tuck tail and run, he made a big show of backing down. Karen wasn’t fooled for an instant. “There’s no need to get so excited, Karen.”

“Mrs. Holt,” Karen said. “If you don’t mind.”

Iverson’s smile looked strained. “Mrs. Holt. Let’s start again. If you’ll come with me, I’m sure we can sort this matter out in private.”

He gestured her toward the door.

Before Karen could figure out a workplace-appropriate way to tell Iverson to go screw himself, Eli jumped in.

“Uh, yeah, I don’t think so. Last time someone went in there looking for answers, she disappeared off the face of the Earth.”

Karen turned to give Eli a quelling glare, and he looked suitably chastised. This part had been his idea—Karen was supposed to be the straight-laced do-gooder trying to solve a problem without ruffling more feathers than strictly necessary.

So Eli had volunteered to say all the things Karen couldn’t let herself say—within reason, of course. It was like some kind of vigilante good cop/bad cop act, and Karen almost had to laugh at the absurdity of it.

“I don’t see why we can’t talk right here,” Karen said, as if Eli hadn’t spoken at all.

Iverson crossed his arms. “Because there’s nothing to talk about. I don’t remember Ms. Mendoza being here at all—except that one time we caught her trespassing.”

“The time you held her illegally and only released her because I agreed not to sue if you didn’t press charges?” Karen smiled as an angry red spread across Iverson’s face. His eyes darted to the camera, and Karen found herself hoping his flush showed up well on the footage. Let the world see him squirm. “Listen, we can go back and forth on this matter all day if you like, but I’m sure you have better things to do, so I’ll cut to the chase: Val _was_ here. We found a piece of her digital recorder on the grounds. There was a partial fingerprint on it that I’m positive will be linked back to Val just as soon as the lab get through with it.”

For a moment, it looked like Iverson was going to call her bluff, but there was a carefully calculated amount of truth in Karen’s story. Akira _had_ found the remains of the recorder, and Karen _was_ certain it had belonged to Val. But it was much too small a fragment to hold any prints of useable size, and Karen hadn’t bothered to turn it over to the police.

But there was little Iverson could do to argue without admitting to Val’s presence on the grounds.

Karen let him stew for a moment, then reached into her briefcase and pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph of the casing, framed in such a way that it would be difficult to judge the size of the fragment. “I thought you might be skeptical,” she said, watching Iverson’s face for a tell.

His lips curled downward, and he folded the photograph into quarters. “A fake,” he said. “I hope you don’t make a habit of building cases on nonsense like that.”

“I’m well aware that it won’t hold up in court, Iverson. But it does raise some questions, and if you won’t provide me with answers, I’m sure the police will be more than happy to find their own. Now.” She reached into her briefcase and pulled out a notepad and pen. “Care to tell me what really happened that day?”

“I can’t.” Iverson glanced again at the camera—it was like Eli was a fly that kept buzzing in his ear. The poor soldier couldn’t stop shooting it irritated glares. “Last I heard, you were the _Gunderson_ _s_ _’_ lawyer. I don’t see how this is relevant to _your_ interests, so I’m afraid I’m going to decline to satiate your curiosity.”

It was relevant on several levels, but Karen didn’t see why she should have to play her whole hand now. She flipped to the back of her notebook, where she’d paper clipped a photocopy of a document, folded into quarters.

She handed it to Iverson.

“Miss Mendoza suspected something might happen when she came to talk with you,” Karen explained. “Before she left she granted me power of attorney. Signed, notarized, and filed with the state of New Mexico on the thirtieth of last month. You may keep that copy for your records, if you like, but allow me to summarize the salient points: Miss Mendoza has granted me durable power of attorney, effective upon her incapacitation, so until I receive proof that Miss Mendoza is alive and well—or dead, presumably not at _your_ hands—I must consider this contract effective as of two and a half weeks ago.”

Val had been more than a little uneasy when Karen had suggested this—as she’d suggested Eli and Akira also sign such documents, as Karen had signed one naming Eli as her agent.

Karen smiled grimly. “As Miss Mendoza’s attorney-in-fact, I have authority in a number of matters, but most relevant at the moment, I think, is letter f, Claims and Litigation.” She paused, seeing the pieces fall into place in Iverson’s eyes. “At Val’s own request, I have full authority to pursue legal matters on her behalf, and I can _assure_ you, Commander, even if you manage to obfuscate the matter so much the DA decides she doesn't have a criminal case against you, I will sue you for every penny you've got tied up in this blood-stained institution. Any questions?”

Iverson’s mouth worked silently for several seconds. Behind Karen, Eli seemed to be trying to stifle his laughter.

When Iverson at last looked up, Karen saw she’d backed him into a corner—and he knew it. She glanced down at the shorthand transcription she’d made of Akira’s notes, and put the final nail in the coffin.

“Give it up, Iverson. The Garrison may be a _pseudo-_ military organization, but we both know your own strictures forbid you from interfering with the life, property, or activity of a private citizen without providing a full and public accounting.”

The words—nearly an exact quote, if Karen wasn’t completely off her mark—made Iverson’s eyes narrow. _That’s right, Mitch. I’ve got eyes on the inside. Don’t think your little smokescreens can hold me off forever._

She twitched the lapels of her blazer, smiling. “Well. Seeing as Miss Mendoza’s business is, legally, now _my_ business, I’m here to settle accounts. What. Happened?”

The walls crumbled. Iverson glared sullenly at the camera, but he could see he was beat. Throwing a fit wouldn’t help him now.

“There was an… incident on the grounds several weeks ago. Miss Mendoza was caught trespassing, but before we could detain her, she ran. She must have broken her…” He flicked the corner of the folded photograph showing the piece of plastic casing. “You said this was a recorder? She must have broken it as she ran.”

Eli snorted. “Right. And you haven’t gone to the police yet because…?”

“That’s a matter of national security,” Iverson said shortly. “The law doesn’t require me to divulge state secrets, Madam Holt, even if you’re Mendoza’s goddamn life coach.”

“State secrets?” Eli sounded incredulous. “Like what, the fact that you murdered three kids?”

Karen was extremely happy she’d brought him along. Her own simmering rage made her voice cold as she told Eli, halfheartedly, to watch his tongue. Her eyes never left Iverson’s.

She knew what he’d done. To Val. To Pidge and their teammates. To the crew of the _Persephone_ , maybe. He knew that she knew. It was a delicate balance they walked. If Iverson was the first to waver, then Karen might finally get the proof she needed to damn him. If it was Karen who buckled, then she would probably wind up dead, with no more evidence tying her back to the Garrison than any of the others.

Fortunately, Karen had the Holt stubbornness. Iverson could bluster all he wanted, but she would never so much as blink. Actually, she almost felt sorry for him.

* * *

“What’s that one doing out of the cells?”

Val blinked, raising her head to stare at the Galra who had spoken. Since being dragged out of the cell, Val had kept her head down, trying to look meek and unassuming as she counted the doors they passed and tried to etch out a mental map of the prison.

Up to this point, aside from her two escorts, Val had only seen silent, uncurious guards patrolling. They whirred faintly, which—unlikely as it sounded—suggested they were actually robots. Fully autonomous, and competent enough that they’d been given the majority of the patrols. These Galra, whoever they were, were looking more advanced with every tidbit Val gleaned about them.

The Galra who had stopped them stood with arms crossed, glowering at Val. Her guards, clearly intimidated, saluted.

“I-it’s nothing, ma’am,” one of them said. “She was just making a ruckus. Said she wanted to talk to you, but of course we weren’t going to bother you with it, Commander Vanda, ma’am.”

 _Vanda._ For a moment the name resonated in Val’s mind. She’d heard it before, handn’t she? Somewhere…

Oh.

Iverson. When Val had overheard him in the Garrison command center, he’d been discussing an invasion with someone he called Vanda. Val had assumed it was some enemy nation. Russia or somewhere, Val didn’t know.

Of course, now that Val was being held prisoner by aliens, probably on a space ship, it wasn’t especially surprising to learn that Iverson was working with those aliens. Which meant he hadn’t betrayed the United States. He’d betrayed the entire human race.

_Well, shit._

Even as Val was studying Vanda—tall, pinch-faced, ears like fins; fuzzy skin that was shiny and scaled on the face and hands—Vanda stared right back at Val. Where the prisoners all wore the same purple jumpsuits and the guards wore basically identical armor, Vanda was dressed like somebody important. Her jumpsuit had a vaguely military aesthetic about it, and was covered with a shiny black breastplate emblazoned with an angular red symbol.

But she also wore a fur-lined cape and had delicate silver chains draped across her chest. Her nails—claws, really—were painted blood red and filed sharp, and she had a glowing purple crystal on a clip pinning back her thin hair.

Vanda smiled.

“Well, now,” she said, in the kind of cloyingly fake tone that only ever belonged in the mouth of cartoon witches and evil stepmothers. “If the girl wants to talk, I say let her talk.”

Two sharp canines flashed behind Vanda’s smile, and for a moment Val honestly had to wonder if she was dealing with a furry alien vampire. Trade the purple fluff for a bad accent, and the likeness would be uncanny.

Vanda waved for the guards to follow her down the hall and into a small, white-walled room lit with the prison’s typical dim purple glow. Val couldn’t tell where it was coming from in here, but it gave the room an ominous aura—one that only grew more unsettling as the guards sat Val in one of the two chairs situated on opposite sides of the room’s one table.

The guards took up posts outside the door, leaving Val alone with Commander Vanda.

“So...” Val leaned back, trying not to let her nerves show. “Is this the part where I ask for a lawyer, or were you expecting me to let you goad me into confessing in a fit of frustration and rage?”

Vanda’s forehead wrinkled, and Val realized the woman didn’t have eyebrows. Or… maybe they were shaved. Val didn’t know what the Galra considered fashionable. It made her look severe, made her expression a little bit harder to read.

The confusion lasted only a moment before Vanda shook her head. “Nothing like that, I’m afraid. You said you wanted to talk to me? Well, then. Consider this an interview.”

An interview, was it? Val smiled. Now _that_ was something she knew how to do. Leading conversations around to the interesting bits, dragging newsworthy stories out of people who’d rather complain about how _young people these days are ruining everything with their technology and their political correctness._

“All right,” Val said brightly. “Do I get a job when this is over?”

“That depends on how well you answer my questions, now doesn’t it?” Vanda tapped one claw on the edge of the table, then sat, meeting Val’s eyes steadily. “Iverson says he caught you eavesdropping on our conversation. How much did you overhear?”

Val shrugged, trying to look like someone who was way out of her depth and totally clueless. Two years of community theater didn’t make her an A-list actor—but eighteen years getting into trouble with Lance (and sweet-talking her way out again) certainly helped.

“I… didn’t hear much, to be honest. It’s not like I was there _hoping_ to uncover an alien invasion being orchestrated by my own government.” She paused, making a big show of trying to remember. “There was something about an emperor. Iverson was against the invasion, maybe? He seemed scared.”

A smile tugged at Vanda’s lips. “Mitch Iverson is a coward and a weakling,” she said, which seemed a little harsh considering they seemed to be co-conspirators in this whole Galra invasion thing. “He wouldn’t last a month in my army.”

Val blinked owlishly. “I dunno, I thought he made some good points. It’s not like the Earth is completely helpless, you know.”

“Are you talking about your primitive little guns?” Vanda asked, sneering. “Your oh-so-deadly bombs. _Nuclear_ power? You humans are more of a threat to yourselves than to any _real_ power in this universe.”

Vanda’s laugh was decidedly not reassuring. Possibly that was overconfidence talking, but Val was inclined to believe the Galra really were that advanced. Iverson hadn’t seemed to respect Vanda any more than she respected him, which meant they both thought they needed each other to get what they wanted.

 _So probably best not to pick a fight with the aliens,_ Val thought. She filed the problem away for later. Now was the time to gather information, not to make plans. She had to treat this like any other story. Facts first. Listen, ask questions, dig deep, link it all together in her head so she could rearrange it and come out with something that sold.

“If you weren’t there because of me,” Vanda said slowly, trailing her claw along the tabletop like a kid drawing random designs in crayon, “then why _were_ you there?”

Val hesitated for a fraction of a second. She didn’t know how long the Galra had been invested in the Garrison. Had they been behind Lance’s disappearance? The Kerberos disaster? There was no way to know, but Val didn’t want this woman to know what Lance meant to Val. Not if there was any way around it.

“I’m a reporter,” Val said. “I was working on a story.”

“About what?”

Val shrugged. “There were lots of weird things going on with the Garrison. Crashed ships in the desert, three cadets killed in a training accident. I was thinking something more along the lines of negligence and shitty management than evil alien plot to take over the world, but either way it could have been the story of my life. _Government Agency Killing Kids._ It’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

Vanda didn’t react. “And that’s it? No other… motive? You weren’t trying to find something? Get in touch with someone?”

Heart pounding, Val stared back at Vanda with careful disinterest. “No. Why, you haven’t got the president locked up down the hall, do you?” _Or my cousin?_ God, if Lance was here--

No.

Plans were for later. Gather information. Listen. Focus.

“Your little local leaders aren’t worth my time.” Vanda waved her hand, claws shining in the low light like they were wet with fresh blood. “I was thinking something bigger. Someone more powerful. Voltron, perhaps?”

This time, Val didn’t have to fake her confusion. “Who?”

Vanda stared at her, eyes gleaming. “The Alteans left something on your planet. Many things, if the druids are right. Some of those things have already been found, but I thought perhaps… No?”

Val blinked furiously, trying to keep up with the conversation. Alteans, druids, this Voltron person. What the hell was going on? “Who are the Alteans? Why is _Earth_ so important?”

Vanda didn’t answer, of course—not that Val had expected her to. That’s was okay. The pieces weren’t falling into place yet, but Val knew how to be patient. There was something big going on, and Val was uniquely positioned to find out pieces of that puzzle. Pieces the rest of the world didn’t have. Even if she didn’t find answers, anything she could bring back to Earth might help someone smarter than her pin down Vanda’s plan and figure out how to drive the Galra away.

Still, Val’s head was spinning as Vanda continued her interrogation.

* * *

“New tonight: the story of a missing woman leads to an unlikely confrontation at the Galaxy Garrison. Hear what her lawyer has to say, tonight at ten.”

Karen leaned back against the couch cushion, breathing out a long sigh.

“Really? That’s _it_?”

Eli poked his head out of the kitchen, frowning. “What is that, channel seven?” He clicked his tongue. “They’re always like that. The Garrison’s got too much of a handle on their controls. Had to cash in all my favors with Monica just to get her to air the story.” He returned to making dinner, his voice drifting out to Karen. “Try channel thirteen. DeWitt sounded real interested in the story when I gave him the footage.”

Karen grabbed the remote and flipped to channel thirteen. They were showing local sports highlights at the moment and went to commercial soon after, but by the time Eli came out with a homemade pizza and garlic bread, it was on.

“Val Mendoza was last seen on Garrison property eighteen days ago,” said Karen’s voice on the recording. Iverson’s face was clearly visible, a stony mask looming over Karen’s shorter figure. “I don’t know if she’s dead or not, but until you give me reason to believe otherwise, I have to assume someone on your staff was responsible for her disappearance.”

The clip ended, and the screen switched over to the two anchors for channel thirteen. There was a beat of grim silence, as if the anchors themselves needed a moment to process what they’d just seen.

“What you just saw was a clip from a video released earlier today by Carlsbad lawyer Karen Holt.” The redheaded anchor straightened her papers, frowning. “In it, Holt confronts Commander Mitch Iverson of the Galaxy Garrison about the disappearance of Alba Valeria Mendoza, former journalist for a local paper and cousin to Lance Mendoza, one of the students killed just over a month ago in a training accident on Garrison property.”

The redhead’s coanchor, a Latina woman with a tight expression, laid her hands on the desk. “The Garrison has released a statement saying that Mendoza was trespassing on the night of her disappearance. There was, quote, an incident, but due to the sensitive nature of the events, further details are not available at this time.” She smiled the same cold, sharp smile Karen recognized from the mirror. It was the smile of professionalism barely holding anger at bay. “You have to wonder, though, why the Garrison didn’t report the matter for more than two weeks.”

The redhead remained placid, but her voice was no warmer than her coworker’s. “Indeed. Karen Holt will be representing the family of Pidge Gunderson, one of Lance Mendoza’s teammates, also killed in the accident, in the upcoming wrongful death suit. Sources indicate a similar lawsuit may be forthcoming in the case of Val Mendoza, even if the police find no evidence of foul play.”

“In other news--”

Karen didn’t wait to see what the next story was. She leaned forward to press the power button on the remote, and the TV went dark. A thrill of anticipation shot through her as she turned to Eli.

“Iverson’s not going to be happy about this,” Eli said, smiling grimly.

“No,” said Karen, taking a slice of pizza. “He won’t be happy at all.”

* * *

Thace didn’t know how long he’d spent in this cell, steeped in darkness, the only sound the occasional sentry patrol passing by outside. He’d known, of course, that spying on Zarkon’s army meant risking his life. Every mission ran the risk of discovery, and discovery meant, at best, a quick execution. More often, it meant torture. He just wished it hadn’t happened _now_ , with Voltron out there making real headway in the war.

 _We can change things,_ Keena had told him, twenty long years ago. _You know Zarkon’s way is wrong, Thace. Help me replace his empire with something better._

Thace remembered well their early fervor. Thace had been young, and though the risks had left him jittery and sick with nerves, he’d thrown himself into rebellion headlong. By the time Keith was five, Thace had thought himself invincible. Him and Keena and Dez. They watched each other’s backs, and they won important victories, pushing toward freedom for the rest of the universe.

Then came the day Keena was found out.

The door hissed opened, revealing Nadezda herself, grim-faced and towering in her full battle armor.

“So,” Thace said. “It’s execution, is it? Do try to make it quick.”

Something flickered in Dez’s face, and Thace wondered one last time whether she would pass along a message about Haggar’s research and the tracking device in the Champion’s arm. Assuming, of course, Thace could find a way to _tell_ her, without landing her on the executioner’s block beside him.

Snorting, Dez, tossed something at Thace’s head.

He flinched back, and the packet rebounded off the wall to land in his lap.

“Dinner,” she said. ‘Freeze-dried gnatta meal. I _know_ how you love that.”

Thace grimaced. “My favorite,” he said dryly.

Dez crossed her arm and leaned back against the cell door. “Knock it off with the dramatics, Thace. Prorok knows as well as I do that someone set you up.”

The words were calculated, carefully bored, but they sent a shock running through Thace. He looked up at Dez, waiting to be sure his voice would remain steady. “I’m glad to hear it, Captain, but if that’s the case, why am I here?”

“It’s a setup,” Dez said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “There _is_ evidence. Circumstantial, mostly, and the rest of it probably faked, but Prorok did ask me to do this by the book.” She waved a hand, and Thace had to admire her ability to look exhausted by the bureaucracy of it all, even if there was a strain around her eyes that spoke of genuine concern. “Look, just cooperate with us. If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

In other words, Thace thought, he was supposed to sit tight. Dez was doing what she could, and Thace was just going to have to trust her.

There had been a time when trusting Nadezda was the most terrifying part of the whole treasonous plot, but Dez had proved herself many times over. That whole mess with Keena would have been much more troublesome if Dez hadn’t quietly smoothed over the mess Thace had left behind.

 _He knew._ Thace had been near to panicking that day, cloistered in Dez’s office under the pretense of debriefing—standard procedure when Galra officers were found dead in their own quarters. _He knew she was working with the local resistance. It was only a matter of time before he realized I was helping her. I_ had _to kill him!_

Before that day, Thace had always regarded Dez as a cold, unbending traditionalist. A rebel for some unfathomable reason, but infinitely closer to Zarkon’s moral code than Thace and his sister. He’d always let Keena deal with her; the two of them got on much better than did Thace and Dez.

But Keena was gone, and it was Dez who cleared Thace’s name, who reframed the whole incident. No one else ever knew the truth: that Keena had been sheltering members of the local defense corps, hiding them from her superiors. They’d had valuable information that the higher ups needed to know—and thanks to Keena, that information had made it off the doomed world.

Nerent had discovered her, but he’d made the mistake of coming to Thace—his commanding officer, as well as Keena’s—before anyone else. If he’d realized Thace and Keena were siblings, he might have acted differently, but by then they’d spent the better part of a decade distancing themselves, hiding their familial ties without making it look too much like there was something to hide.

The official story, thanks largely to Dez’s intervention, was that Keena had spared the lives of locals pretending to be innocent, unarmed refugees. They’d killed her along with Nerent. Keena would be remembered as a weakling, but not a traitor. It was the only mercy Thace could offer to her son.

Thace nodded now to Dez and raised the meal packet in salute. “Consider me fully at your disposal,” he said. Dez nodded and turned to go. “Oh, one more thing?”

Dez turned, eyebrow quirked in silent question.

Thace smiled. “When you find the real traitor, make sure you save a piece for me.”

* * *

Val wasn’t _entirely_ unscathed when she finally ended up back in her cell with Luis and Yir. Turned out Vanda had a limit to how much sass she would put up with. Val hadn’t even seen that line approaching, then suddenly she was getting backhanded across the face. Still, Val counted the whole venture a resounding success.

She spat out the taste of blood and gingerly touched her split lip, scowling as the door closed behind the guards. Their footsteps faded, and the cell block’s outer door closed and locked behind them.

In an instant, Yir was beside her, reaching out to check her over.

“I’m fine,” she told them, waving her hand to show that there was only a tiny spot of blood.

Yir trilled unhappily. “You shouldn’t have done that,” they said. “You could’ve been killed.”

Val snorted. “Wasn’t though, was I? _And_ I found out some things.”

“Useful things?” Luis asked, crossing his arms. “Or do you just mean that you found out what happens when you pitch a fit on a ship full of hostile aliens?”

Sticking her tongue out irritated her split lip, so Val settled for flipping him off. “Useful stuff. I’m pretty sure. Yir, would you say you’re a pretty knowledgeable person?”

With all that fluffy yellowish fur, it was difficult to say what their face looked like, but Val was willing to bet confusion featured heavily. “As much as anyone, I guess,” Yir said. “Why?”

“Because Vanda mentioned some things that sound important, and I want to know if _you_ know what they mean.”

“Okay… Shoot.”

Luis grunted, slouching against the wall. “This ought to be good.”

Val ignored him and ran through her mental list of _questions to ask a friendlier alien._ Things Vanda had asked Val about, things she’d heard passing guards mention on the way back to the cells, and things Val had managed to tease out of Vanda through a combination of a clueless act and the kind of inane rambling that made the commander snap just to get the conversation back on track. Yir wasn't exactly Google, but she would worth with the resources she had available. "Let’s start with Voltron,” she said.

She’d been prepared to elaborate, maybe give Yir some context, but they shivered at the name, fur poofing out like a spooked cat’s tail.

“Wait, that’s actually a thing?” Val asked. “I thought she’d made it up.”

“No.” Yir quivered again, shaking their head. “It’s very real. And if the Galra are talking about it, the rumors must be true.”

“Rumors?”

“That Voltron has returned.”

Val raised her hands. “Okay, hold on. I think you need to start from the beginning. What’s Voltron? What do you mean _returned?_  Where did it go?”

"It vanished,” Yir said. “Ten thousand years ago, when the Galra started this whole war. Voltron is the most powerful weapon in the universe. It exists to stop people like Zarkon, to maintain peace in the civilized universe.”

Well, that _was_ interesting. A weapon? And Vanda seemed to be looking for it, or at least for information about it. But why _here_? Val was pretty sure no one could keep rumors from spreading if an alien superweapon had been found on Earth.

"And it’s back now?” Val asked. “Someone’s using it?”

Yir nodded. “The paladins. It takes five of them to pilot Voltron.”

“Interesting…” Val was going to have more questions, but she let the subject rest for now. It sounded like most of what Yir knew was half myth, anyway, and considering how quickly stories could become urban legends back on Earth, Val knew she'd have some heavy lifting to do sorting fact from fantasy.

Later.

For now, she moved on down the list. “Okay, what about Alteans? And druids. They seemed connected somehow?” Val paused, tapping her chin. "Or at least the druids are doing something that relates to the Alteans."

“They're different,” Yir said. “The Alteans built Voltron, but they died out ten thousand years ago, around the same time Voltron disappeared. Zarkon wiped them out.”

“And—just checking—Zarkon’s the Galra emperor?”

Yir nodded. “Zarkon rules them, and his second in command is Haggar. She’s the head of the druids.” Yir paused, shivering. “The less you know about the druids, the better. They’re cruel, even for Galra, and the magic they use is… unnatural.”

That explanation positively _screamed_ for digging deeper, but seeing as Yir was clearly uncomfortable talking about it, Val let it rest. For now.

“Just a couple more,” she said, drumming her fingers on her knees. She felt like she was doing a jigsaw puzzle, connecting two or three pieces here and there. She couldn’t see the whole picture yet, but she could feel it beginning to take shape. “Balmera?”

“Massive creatures who produce the crystals used to power ships and other equipment, and to provide crews with Quintessence during space travel.”

Val had been about to continue her list, but she stopped now. “...Quintessence?”

“Life energy.”

“Right. Sure.” Val opened her mouth, then shook her head. “Druidic magic, ancient alien superweapons—I suppose I have no right to start questioning things _now._  Okay, uh, Berlou.”

This one stumped Yir. “I… think Berlou is a planet? I’m not sure, and I don’t know much about it even if I’m right.”

“That’s okay. Last one. Not a word this time, just… Vanda kept asking me where it was hidden.”

Yir frowned. “Where what was hidden?”

“That’s just it.” Val tapped her foot, impatient. “She wouldn’t say. She just kept saying _they found it,_ and screaming at me to tell her how, or where, or whether there was anything else with _it,_  whatever _it_ was.” Sighing, Val forced herself to let it go. If the Galra were incompetent enough to let any old prisoner in on _all_ their secrets, they wouldn’t have stayed in power for ten thousand years.

Still, the beginnings of a plan were coming together in Val’s mind. She hesitated to say anything out loud, just in case the Galra were listening, but she had a direction now. As much as she ached to get out and explore the rest of this ship—and she was almost certain it _was_ a ship; the corridors formed a small loop, and there were junctions that looked like airlocks between the cells and the rest of the ship—she knew she could do more good focusing on escape.

Yes, it was possible—probable, even—that Lance and the other two had been brought here, but what good would it do Val to _find_ them if they were all still stuck?

She had to get out. She had to get help. If these Voltron people really were all they were cracked up to be, then maybe Val could convince them to come to Earth’s aid.

Part of her mind was rational enough to think that the universe was a very big place, and Earth was just one small, sad, unimportant corner, but she didn’t care. She would grab the paladins by ear and _drag_ them back if she had to. It might be Earth’s only shot at chasing away the Galra.

Well. That was that, then. She still had questions, but she also had a goal. Get out. She’d have to steal a ship that could carry her to wherever Voltron was, and she’d need to find or bring someone who could navigate. And pilot. And fight, ideally.

This was going to be tricky.

 _Lucky for me, I don’t have any other obligations at the moment,_ she thought wryly, and closed her eyes, retracing the corridors she’d seen in her brief excursion. There were three main problems to tackle, she figured: getting out of the cells, getting past the guard, and getting away in a ship.

It didn’t take her long to come to one very important conclusion: she was going to need to see more of this ship. Today's constitutional had showed her only a very small section of hallways, plus Vanda's interrogation room. Certainly nothing like a hangar, or escape pods, or a radio (did aliens use radios?) She groaned, letting her head fall back against the wall. “I’m going to end up with a lot more than a split lip, aren’t I?”


	9. Shay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... Team Voltron attacked a prison world named Revinor, where "weak" and "traitorous" Galra were sent. Despite a comms failure, an ambush in the air, and child hostages on the ground, the paladins prevailed--due in large part to the fact that Shiro and Allura found a way to copilot the Black Lion. In doing so, they gained the ability to sense and communicate with the rest of the team, coordinating the battle from afar and allowing Keith, Matt, and Lance to rescue dozens of Galra prisoners.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1519  
>  Dated three months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Twenty subjects from Generation Five remain on Vel-17. We will soon need to begin selection for Generation Six.
> 
> Second phase research on Subject 5Nn [Pidge’s note: Matt] proceeds on schedule. The first seed crystal was implanted today. We will monitor its growth over the coming days.

* * *

“So… you didn’t even know it was us?” Shiro asked, incredulous. “And you still listened?”

Matt paused, a spoonful of food goo soup hovering over his bowl, and frowned. “No, I’m pretty sure I could tell it was Allura—it… _was_ , wasn’t it?”

Allura nodded. She, like Shiro, seemed much too interested in what the other paladins had to say to eat. They’d finally finished getting the Galra settled in the living quarters on the fifth floor and had sat down to a late meal. The high of a successful rescue seemed to have everyone worked up, and news of Shiro and Allura’s synchronized piloting only drove that energy higher.

Keith swallowed a bite of Hunk’s homemade space bread (day old, but still delicious) and scratched behind his ear. “It was like… I wouldn’t have been able to prove it was you, but I knew.”

“And you just… listened to these mysterious impulses that _felt_ like us,” Shiro said, brow furrowed. “Seriously?”

Keith shrugged. “Don’t look at me.” He waved one hand, lifting his spoon in the other. “Red paladin, remember? Listening to my gut is kinda my thing.”

“He’s got a point,” Matt said. “Sure, maybe it wasn’t _our_ guts telling us what to do, but I mean. Come on. Like we’d ever _not_ listen to you.”

Shiro glanced at Pidge, Hunk, and Lance, who all nodded.

Pidge, hunched over their food goo soup, arched an eyebrow. “I mean, granted, I feel a lot better now that I _know_ what it was. I almost thought that nanobot-robeast-swarm-thing was causing hallucinations. But when you think about it, our lions do _way_ more weird psychic crap than anything Zarkon’s come up with. I figured it was worth the risk.”

Shiro wondered if he looked as dumbfounded as Allura. It was one thing to issue telepathic orders to his team and have them obeyed. Now that he knew those _orders_ were more like an inexplicable urge that came out of the blue, it seemed incredible that they’d managed to get _anything_ done.

Chuckling, Coran stood and went to get a second helping from the food goo machine. They were eating in the kitchen today, too tired to bother setting the table in the dining hall. Allura turned to watch Coran’s progress, frowning at his back.

“And what’s got you snickering like a poppercrup?” she demanded, pouting. Across the table, Hunk leaned over to whisper in Shay’s ear, and Shay had to cover her mouth to hide her grin.

Coran waited until his bowl was full of goo before he turned, smiling placidly. “Have you already forgotten, Princess? What was it your father said about the Black Lion? She chooses paladins who--”

“Who are decisive and in control at all times,” Allura said, waving a hand. “Yes, I _know_ , Coran. What has that got to do with anything?”

But Coran’s smile just tugged wider. “I was talking about the second part, actually.”

Allura frowned, forehead wrinkling. Then her eyes went wide, and her cheeks darkened with a blush. “Oh.”

It was Shiro’s turn to frown. “What?” He glanced from Allura, smiling sheepishly as she snuck glances at the other paladins, to Coran, who managed to look remarkably smug as he spooned food goo into his mouth. “I’m missing the joke here.”

“No joke, Black Two,” Coran said, dabbing his napkin on the corner of his mouth. “Black paladins, in addition to being decisive and self-controlled, are natural born leaders. How did Alfor put it? ‘The sort of people whose men will follow without hesitation.’”

Shiro turned toward the others, suddenly choked up. “Guys...”

“Ha!” Lance leveled his spoon at Shiro, smirking. “See? It’s not us. It’s you.”

“Well.” Allura smoothed her napkin in her lap, looking more flustered than Shiro had ever seen her. (He couldn’t fault her for it; Shiro himself could feel the threat of tears, though he was managing to stay dry-eyed with only a minimum of blinking.) Allura breathed in, smiled, met the others’ eyes one by one. “Thank you for your trust.”

“You’ve earned it.” The way Keith said it, more than a little distracted as he poked through his soup for something more solid than slightly de-constituted food goo, struck a chord in Shiro, and he could offer no answer but a smile and a grateful nod. Around the table, he saw Keith’s statement echoed in every face.

“You’d never steer us wrong,” Hunk said. “Either of you. We knew you must’ve had a good reason for telling us to do those things, even if you couldn’t explain why.” He glanced quickly at the others, suddenly bashful. “I-I mean, that’s how I feel, I don’t know about you guys, but--”

“Nah, that pretty much sums it up.” Lance slurped his soup loudly, his eyes twinkling in Shiro’s direction.

Shiro wasn’t sure what he’d done to earn their trust so quickly. Aside from Matt and Keith, he hadn’t known any of these people for more than a month, and they’d met when Shiro still wore the armor of a Galra soldier.

However it had happened, it warmed Shiro, and he sat a little taller as the meal resumed. Allura caught his eyes, and Shiro saw his own resolve reflected back at him. The mantle of black paladin was a heavy burden to bear, but it wasn’t as heavy as it had been the day before. He had Allura, and she had him, and neither of them intended to let down their friends. They were young, and they were inexperienced, but they were stronger together. Strong enough, he hoped, to stop Zarkon’s expansion once and for all.

A few minutes later, Matt pushed his bowl away and crossed his arms on the tabletop, leaning forward eagerly. “Okay, but you guys can’t tell me you haven’t thought about what this means.”

“Me and Allura?” Shiro asked, frowning. “I guess it means that these comms problems aren’t as big a threat any more.”

“Not that we should ignore them entirely,” Allura said. “Coran, we should look into updating our systems to something Zarkon isn’t so familiar with. Perhaps Pidge can help.”

“I’d be happy to,” Pidge said, smiling at Coran. “I’ve got a few ideas, actually. Some designs I came up with back when I was intercepting Galra transmissions looking for Dad and Matt. Earth tech isn’t advanced enough to realize my designs, but they’re theoretically sound. Maybe with the stuff you guys have here, we can work something out.”

Matt drummed his fingers on the table, arching one eyebrow as Pidge twisted, grabbing the laptop they’d left on the floor behind their chair. They pulled up a blueprint and waved Coran over to start discussing prototypes.

Matt rolled his eyes. “Okay, not to put a damper on your enthusiasm, Pidge, but that’s not what I meant.” He glanced at Shiro, who blinked. He recognized that light in Matt’s eye. He was excited about something, excited enough that he was working himself up to a dramatic reveal. “Keith and I were the first to sync up, right?” He jerked his thumb at Keith. “It was Red’s idea. The way she was built, no one pilot was ever going to live up to her potential.”

“Right,” Shiro said, trying to see where Matt was taking this. “Black must have been inspired by Red, but adapted the idea to fit her systems.”

“And her paladins,” Allura added. “Red paladins don’t need to issue orders any more than black paladins need to be able to fly circles around the rest of the team.”

Matt and Keith both grinned at that, their pride a tangible thing. Shiro chuckled and shook his head. “So what’s your point?”

“My _point_ ,” said Matt, “is that if two of the lions figured it out… doesn’t it stand to reason that _all_ of them can?”

“I suppose.” Shiro frowned, chuckling as Matt deflated. Clearly, he’d been hoping for a better reaction. “So you’re saying we should be looking for the Yellow, Blue, and Green Lions to choose a second paladin?”

A strangled gasp drew the table’s attention to Pidge, who was staring, wide-eyed, over the top of their laptop. Their mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, then:

“Or… possibly there’s a very slight chance that one of them might have _already_ picked paladin number two. Or, I don’t know, maybe more than just one, I’m just spitballing here, and I can’t really _know_ anyway, _I’m_ not a lion. I wasn’t even _there_ , really, it just seems weird to me. Seemed weird at the time, too, but back then I had no idea dual paladins was even a _thing_ , so how was I supposed to know it was more than just a fluke, right? I mean--”

“Pidge,” Matt said, holding up his hands. “Breathe.” They did, and Matt lowered his hands. “Okay, now start over. You think one of the other lions has already chosen a second paladin?”

Pidge nodded, then turned to stare at Shay. “Yellow dropped her shield for you.”

Silence washed over the table, followed shortly by a cacophony of overlapping voices.

“What?”

“Are you _serious_? That’s awesome!”

“When was this?”

Allura spoke loudest of them all. “Is this true, Shay? Did the Yellow Lion let her shield down for you?”

Shay nodded, her eyes wide and luminous. “I… Yes. She did. When you all first came to Balmera, after you were captured. I carried the crystal you needed to your lions.” She frowned. “I… am confused. The Yellow Lion understood I was trying to help you. She lowered her shield so I could load the crystal. Does that hold some other significance?”

“Very much so,” Allura said. “Only a paladin should be able to get through a lion’s shield once it has been raised.”

Shay’s eyes went wider still. “Then… I am...”

Hunk had been silent this whole time, his hands hovering over his mouth, but he began to squeal now, a low sound that quickly built into something like a tea kettle’s whistle. “Aaaaaah _Shay!_ ” he cried, lurching to his feet. His chair topped over backwards, and his bowl of food goo wobbled dangerously until Keith reached over to steady it.

Hunk didn’t even notice. He flung himself at Shay, wrapping his arms around her neck, and screamed into her shoulder.

“Oh my _gosh_! You’re a paladin? That’s amazing!” He pulled back, bouncing with excitement. “Come on. Come on, come on, come on!” He tugged on her arm until she stood, blinking slowly.

“Where…?”

Hunk didn’t wait for her to finish the question. “To Yellow. Come _on!_ ”

They were gone before anyone else could move.

Matt stared after them, amusement plain on his face. “Don’t stay out too late,” he called halfheartedly.

* * *

Shay was too stunned to stop Hunk from pulling her out of the kitchen and down the corridor to the elevator, but once the doors closed and they stood still, everything caught up to her.

It was not an altogether pleasant sensation.

Heart pounding, she pulled her hand out of Hunk’s grasp and turned toward the far wall to avoid his questioning look. The universe felt as though it had shifted out of balance, all the stars tumbling down upon her in a cascade of implications.

A paladin.

The title brought with it a faint surge of pride, but stronger yet was the horror, and guilt directly in its wake. The paladins were the universe’s greatest hope. They were heroes, and Shay should be honored to be counted among their numbers.

Yet all she could think was how close a paladin seemed to a soldier.

“Shay?” Hunk’s voice, kind and hesitant.

Shay pressed her palms to her earslits and shook her head. “I-I am sorry. I was only—I was--”

Gentle fingers ghosted over her arms, the touch so light it could hardly be felt. How odd, she thought, that a species so soft and vulnerable could make marvelous warriors, when one such as herself—thick-skinned, strong-boned, resilient—lacked the strength of will to stand in the face of danger to save another.

Silence filled the elevator until it reached its destination with a chime and a hiss as the door slid aside. Shay did not move and Hunk, after a moment, only came to stand in front of her. His dark eyes, so unlike the eyes of her people, watched her with compassion.

“No one’s asking you to fight.”

Shay’s breath stilled in her chest. “What?”

Hunk bit his lip, but he stayed where he was, hands steady on her arms. “Sorry,” he said. “I was so excited that we might get to co-pilot Yellow that I forgot what you said. You’re not great with the whole getting beat up thing, right? That’s okay. You don’t have to do anything you’re not okay with.”

The words were so kind, so much kinder than Shay deserved, that she felt her temperature rise in shame. She looked away. “It is not only that,” she said.

“Then what is it?” Behind Hunk, the doors slid shut, enclosing them once more in the small, comfortable stillness of the elevator. “You can tell me, Shay. You know that, right? You can tell me anything.”

Shay nodded, though her tongue in her mouth felt like wax. What could she say? Balmerans were a peaceful people. Hardy and patient, they endured, as did the great Balmera. When the Galra had come, the Balmerans had preserved their lives, enduring rather than fighting. Better, her mother had always said, to hold onto one’s integrity than to fight and so become like the very oppressors one sought to cast off.

And yet, was it not that same attitude that had nearly led to her Balmera’s death? Even a creature so great as that could not endure forever, and the universe had already endured Zarkon for ten thousand years. At what point did passivity itself become an ethical compromise?

Hunk ran his hands up and down Shay’s arms, his presence calming. His Quintessence was strong, though not as closely attuned to Shay’s own as was the Balmera’s. She could not decipher every nuance of his unspoken messages, but she could understand them in a broad sense. Just now, he wanted her to know that he cared for her. That he wanted her happiness above all other considerations.

Blinking back tears, Shay took Hunk’s hands in her own, halting his comforting gestures, and forced a smile. “Thank you, Hunk,” she said. “But I am afraid that I will not make a very good paladin. I lack the courage.”

Hunk frowned, his Quintessence darkening with indignation. “Courage? Shay, you risked your life to help us get the crystal we needed. You left your home behind so you could take care of Matt!”

“But I cannot fight.” The mere thought made her insides flutter anxiously. “I _will_ not.”

“You don’t have to.” Hunk turned his hands around, interlacing his fingers with hers. “You don’t even have to come into battle if you don’t want—but if you do, there’s a lot more to do than just fight. Look at Shiro and Allura! When they synced up, Allura didn’t fight at all, she just reached out to the rest of us to coordinate the fight. And if you can fly Yellow, then you could hang back when we break in somewhere. Be our escape plan! Ooh! Or here’s an idea: _field medic_!”

Shay blinked, her nerves beginning to calm. “Medic?”

“Yeah! It’s perfect! Cryopods are great and all, but they aren’t very portable. You already know more than most of us about the stuff in the med bay, and you’ve got that magic healing touch thing!”

“Healing touch?” Shay laughed, and her breath came more easily than it had since the conversation began. “You mean how I can divert some of my Quintessence to another to ease pain and hasten recovery.”

Hunk grinned. “Yeah, that! So what do you say?”

Shay hesitated. She _had_ said she would do what she could and wait to see whether she might make a difference in ways she had not anticipated. Perhaps this was what she had been waiting for. She had grown adept at treating Matt’s crystal sickness; perhaps as a paladin she could aid the others as well, should they need it.

“I think…” The words snagged on Shay’s teeth. Hard enough to watch the paladins train, emerging only with bruises and sore muscles. How much worse would it be to stand beside them as they suffered injuries more grave? “I know not,” she admitted.

“That’s okay,” said Hunk. “One step at a time, right? We can figure out the whole medic thing later. For now… do you at least want to try piloting Yellow?”

That, she very much wanted. The lions—the Yellow Lion in particular—had Quintessence much like that of Shay’s Balmera: ancient, wise, and watchful. Shay treasured every chance she got to ride with Hunk to a market, or to a conference with those the paladins had just freed from the Galra. Sitting at the controls, she imagined, would be many times better.

“Very well,” she said, smiling at Hunk. “Let us see whether she has indeed chosen me.”

* * *

Karen went public.

It was easier than she’d expected when Eli first brought it up. After six months of vultures feeding off her grief following the Kerberos disaster, she was certain she never wanted to put herself in that position again. But Eli had been right. This time it wasn’t just a media frenzy. There was purpose behind it, purpose that she’d seen in action after the footage from the confrontation went live.

They recorded her statement the day after visiting the Garrison, a short, to-the-point explanation of who Pidge was, why they’d snuck into the Garrison, and what they’d found before they were silenced. _I found him, Mom. I found Matt._ The words that had burned so long in her head, now ready to be released into the world.

Eli spent the rest of the day editing it, they both slept on it, and released it Sunday morning.

The response was instantaneous--the buzz from yesterday’s confrontation was still riding strong, and the seeds Eli had planted, reminding the country about the Kerberos mission, were ready to bear fruit.

Within an hour, the video had been viewed ten thousand times. At three hours, the number was over a hundred thousand, and the backlash had spread to social media. The hashtags #GarrisonThree and #WhereIsVal were trending on Twitter, and _Persephone_ memorial posts were making the rounds on Tumblr. Two days later, Eli found an angry post gaining traction on Facebook, mothers banding together over the news of the fourteen-year-old who had been killed by Garrison negligence.

“Word to the wise, keep out of the comments,” Eli warned when he showed Karen one such post.

She quirked an eyebrow. “Why?”

Eli hemmed and hawed, but quickly folded under Karen’s glare. “It’s nothing, just—you know, the internet. Most people are on your side, one hundred percent, but… there are some people—just a few, but a loud few—who’re trying to blame you.”

“Let me guess. I shouldn’t have let them go to the Garrison in the first place.” The words tasted bitter, over-steeped by too many repetitions inside her own head.

Eli grimaced. “Got it in one.”

Pressing her lips together, Karen breathed in through her nose. “That’s fine. As long as they’re talking.”

“They are,” Eli assured her. He clicked through something like thirty tabs, showing her the posts—angry rants about Garrison negligence, photos of the _Persephone_ crew, posts memorializing the three missing cadets, messages of support that had flooded the website Eli had set up to disseminate everything they’d learned so far.

Karen found it all more than a little overwhelming. She’d never been much of one for social media. A Facebook account to collect pictures of her family and keep in touch with college friends. That was it, and she rarely even touched that.

Eli, though. Eli was a machine. Karen was halfway convinced he didn’t sleep at all in the first three days following their release. He was still at his computer each night when she went to bed, and yet he was up before her with more news from the internet.

By Wednesday, the story was making national headlines. On Friday, Iverson’s lawyers contacted Karen to let her know they were building a case against Pidge. (And wouldn’t it be nice if it all just… went away? No media uproar, no wrongful death suit, and Pidge and Val didn’t have to go down in history as terrorists trying to sell state secrets to unknown powers.)

“Convenient, isn’t it?” Karen said coldly to the lawyer on the other end of the line. “The only people you might have built a case against just happen to be dead. Prove to me that there’s someone living whose reputation I should be concerned about, and I might consider your _most_ generous offer.”

She hung up before the man could gather his wits.

Eli looked up from his computer, rubbing his eyes. “Iverson?”

"His lawyers, anyway.”

Grinning, Eli stretched, spine popping as he bent backwards over his ladder-back chair. “Even better. Means he’s scared.”

Karen heaved a sigh. “ _Finally_. Now we just have to keep the pressure on.”

But it wasn’t Iverson and his threat of legal action that hit Karen hardest. Nor was it the reporters hounding her at the office, lining up outside her house, crowding her for interviews and soundbites (she set up a few press conferences, but otherwise ignored them.) It wasn’t even the fact that she now saw the faces of her dead family members everywhere she went, smiling. Captured in a time before the world went to hell.

The worst came on Saturday, when Karen finally had time to breathe, and to think. She’d been meaning to reach out to Val’s family for some time, but she’d always found a reason not to.

Now, Karen figured it was past time.

Carmen Mendoza picked up on the second ring, voice sharp. Karen recognized that tone. It was the voice of someone who was stretched to breaking trying to deal with the media courteously and maturely.

“Mrs. Mendoza?” Karen asked. “Hi. This is Karen Holt.”

“The lawyer?”

Karen faltered, but only for a moment. She’d gotten used to fame-by-association— _Commander Holt’s wife_ , _mother of the dead Garrison cadet—_ and being recognized in her own right was still a new sensation. “Yes,” she said, pressing her cell tight against her ear. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You _should_ be.”

There was a crack of anger in the words, vicious enough to freeze Karen’s next words in her throat. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You _should_ be sorry,” Carmen hissed. “You were the one who sent my daughter in there? You got her killed?”

Guilt closed in around her chest, a vice that threatened to cut off her air. She forced it down. “I wouldn’t say I _sent_ her. Val--”

“Val is _dead_ because of you.” Carmen’s voice shook with rage. Someone else spoke, their voice too soft for Karen to hear, and Carmen responded in Spanish. Karen caught a name—Sebastian—and then Carmen’s focus was back on her. “It wasn’t enough I had to lose a nephew? Now you take my daughter. Who next? My son? Little Luz?”

This was getting out of hand. Karen close her eyes, struggling for calm. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Mendoza. I know this is hard. I know! My whole family is missing.”

“They aren’t _missing_ , Mrs. Holt,” Carmen said, each word as sharp as a slap. “Your family is _dead_.”

Karen reeled, and for the first time since she’d been a rookie in the courtroom found herself with nothing to say. She’d thought the words, of course. _Dead._ She’d thought she had come to accept that. But she’d never had the truth flung in her face like this before, and it stung far more than she expected it to.

“Your family is dead,” Carmen repeated, “and mine is too. Unless you can bring them back, I have nothing to say to you.”

The line clicked and went dead. It was some time before Karen could force herself to move.

* * *

After dinner, while Hunk and Shay were out flying the Yellow Lion, the rest of the team went their separate ways. Lance and Coran disappeared to Coran’s quarters for a game of space chess ( _eshet,_ technically, but Pidge thought it sounded pretentious to call it that.) Keith slipped away quietly without a word to any of them. And Pidge went down to Green’s hangar to work on the translation.

Even just bringing up the file list twisted their stomach up in knots, but they forced themself to open one of the older entries—one the computer had translated, and which still needed to be edited for readability. It was dated more than two years ago, so by all accounts it should have been fine. Matt had still been on Earth when this was written. He’d been a billion light-years away from Vel-17 and the horrible things they did there.

Knowing that didn’t help. Now that Pidge and Keith had made it to the logs detailing what had been done to Matt, that was all Pidge could think about.

Ninety days in the E-dep chamber. _Three months_ in a box the size of a coffin. The crew of the _Persephone_ had undergone rigorous training to prepare for a few months in a five-hundred-square-foot space shuttle. Five hundred square feet, and the Garrison’s psychologists had been concerned about psychological stress. How much worse must it have been for Matt on Vel-17?

Pidge stared at the computer screen for several minutes more, hardly seeing the words before them. Even just taking the elevator down here had made them sick, thinking about Matt. What he’d been through. Maybe Keith had been right, after all. Maybe Pidge shouldn’t have read those entries.

No.

Even if the knowledge made them sick to their stomach, they were glad they knew. Ignorance might have made Pidge feel better, but it wouldn’t change what had happened to Matt.

God, _Matt_. Pidge had always been proud of their brother, but this kind of quiet strength was more than they’d credited him with. The fact that he was fighting at all astounded them, let alone the way he still laughed with Shiro and teased Lance and always, _always_ knew when Pidge needed him.

Screwing their eyes shut, Pidge shut their laptop with a snap. They weren’t going to be able to focus on the translation today. Maybe not for a long time. That was fine. Keith and Pidge were nearly to the end of the logs, so Pidge knew that what they’d done to Matt, with the crystals, hadn’t been part of the usual experiments. All these early entries were useless to Pidge, and they might as well wait for Keith to be there when they continued with the later entries. Pidge didn’t need to be alone when they found out more gruesome details.

For now, they left their laptop sitting on the desk and headed for the elevator, counting the time between floors in both seconds and ticks to try to keep from thinking about Vel-17. Matt had mentioned the rec room to Allura after dinner, so Pidge stopped on the seventh floor and headed down the quiet hallway.

Sure enough, Matt was in the rec room, Shiro and Allura with him. They were playing some kind of card game that used an Altean deck. There was an Earth deck floating around somewhere—printed on the castle’s synthesizer after Matt got sick of always losing to Coran because he couldn’t keep the cards straight. There were no suits in an Altean deck, just seemingly random squiggles that corresponded to ranks of some sort, each with one or two colors, which only mattered in certain games.

Coran, for his part, found face cards incredibly confusing and kept trying to take them out of the Earth deck. Pidge had found three different Queens of Hearts secreted away in various dark corners.

Pidge lingered in the doorway, watching Matt flash a devious smile right before he laid down a card that made Shiro groan and drop his hand on the table.

Allura leaned forward, frowning. “That’s… not a legal move.”

“What?” Matt yelped. “Sure it is.”

Shiro sat up, equally confused. “He’s right, Allura. The virtam is the perfect counter to my quiptrip.”

“It is,” Allura said, “but that’s not the virtam. That’s the leilara.”

Shiro and Matt leaned forward simultaneously to scowl at the card, their foreheads pressing together. Matt let out a huff. “Are you _sure?_ ”

Allura fanned herself with her cards, smiling a smile that, on anyone else, Pidge would have called mischievous. “Which one of us grew up with this game, again?”

Matt narrowed his eyes at her, and when he looked back down at the cards, Allura winked rather obviously at Shiro, who clapped a hand to his mouth just an instant too late to smother his snort of laughter.

Matt’s head whipped up. “What? What is it?” He scrutinized them both, but Shiro had schooled his expression, and Allura was the very picture of innocence. Pidge was tempted to ask her for lessons.

Instead, they stepped forward.

“I think Allura’s cheating so Shiro wins,” they said. The other three turned toward them in surprise, but it didn’t last long. Matt turned to glare at Shiro, who held his hands up in surrender, and then at Allura, who pouted—legitimately _pouted—_ at Pidge.

“Spoilsport.”

Matt gasped dramatically. “Princess Allura! It’s one thing for you to cheat me out of a well-earned victory, but to _besmirch_ the honor of my sibling is a slight I cannot forgive.”

Pidge flopped down beside Matt and crossed their arms on the table. “Shut up, Matt. We both know you deserved it.”

“I swear by my mother’s law degree—wait, what?” Matt rounded on Pidge, looking wounded. “I’m the victim here, Pidge! You’re supposed to be on my side!”

Pidge arched an eyebrow, then turned to Shiro. “How many times has he cheated?”

“Today?” Shiro asked, smirking as Matt’s fish-out-of-water gape turned his way. “None that we can prove.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what I thought.”

Allura gathered the scattered cards and began to shuffle, glancing a question at Pidge, who shook their head. They tried to smile, but it was hard to force a good mood when their mind was still more than halfway in those old research logs.

Matt, of course, was the first one to notice. “Is something wrong?” he asked as Allura and Shiro picked up their hands, Shiro reciting the rules of this game, Allura laughing as she corrected his mistakes.

Pidge shook their head. “It’s nothing.”

Shiro and Allura’s smiles vanished at that, and both sat forward, wearing matching looks of parental concern. “Okay,” Shiro said. “Now we _know_ something’s up.”

Hunching over the table, Pidge buried their nose in the crook of their arm. “I don’t want to talk about it,” they said, which was true. They didn’t want to remind Matt of Vel-17, not when he was actually having fun for once. They just wanted to be here, to remind themself that _Matt_ was here, and that he’d made it out of that hell-hole alive.

Matt’s arm wrapped around Pidge’s shoulders, inviting them closer. Pidge resisted only briefly, then turned and wrapped their arms around Matt’s waist, pressing their face against his chest. He seemed surprised by this reaction, but recovered quickly and returned the hug.

Allura shifted, humming softly. “Perhaps we should...”

“Don’t,” Pidge said. “Don’t go because of me.”

She stilled, and in the silence that followed, Pidge could imagine the others trading looks over their head. Their heart twisted with guilt. It felt wrong to come in here and make them all worry over them, when it was really Matt who had suffered, but what were they supposed to do? Matt hadn’t told the others about what happened on Vel-17 for a reason. Pidge couldn’t just _decide_ that it was time for him to open up about it.

So they just hugged Matt tighter, breathing in his scent, as Shiro stood and moved to their other side. His hand came to rest on their back, rubbing slowly up and down.

“Did something happen?”

Pidge shook their head and gathered their voice, trying to keep it bright. “Sorry. I’m just… tired, I guess.”

Matt’s grip tightened on Pidge’s shoulders for a moment, and Pidge tried not to cringe. Poor choice of words. That was Pidge’s go-to excuse when they were overstimulated and edging toward a meltdown, which was _not_ what this was.

Okay, so maybe they were walking an emotional razor's edge. Pidge squeezed their eyes shut and tried to focus on breathing. They heard Allura start to speak again, then Matt shifted, and she fell silent. Shiro kept up the soothing rhythm of his back rub, and Matt squeezed Pidge tighter, holding on until their breathing evened out.

They almost wished it _hadn’t_ evened out, because that meant facing Matt’s questions. And no matter how nice Matt was, he was poking at a snake with a very short stick.

“Are you feeling better?” he asked.

Pidge shrugged.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Pidge wanted to shake their head, but they hesitated, and by the time they managed to overrule that part of them that hated secrets—that stupid, selfish, rebellious part of them—it was too late. Matt’s chest rose, then collapsed in time with a heavy sigh.

“Okay,” he said, and something in his voice, some softness, reminded Pidge of home. “Did something happen? Are you hurt?”

Pidge shook their head. This was a familiar pattern, Matt asking questions, Pidge answering with a nod or a shake of their head or a shrug. It wasn’t like when other people asked questions. Other people always assumed they already knew the answers, and they just kept repeating themselves until Pidge agreed with them.

Matt actually _listened._ Even when Pidge had nothing to say, Matt listened.

“Are you sad?” he asked, and Pidge hesitated.

Sad. It felt like such a small word, when what they were feeling was so big, so strong. It was sadness, but also anger at what the Galra researchers had done to Matt, frustration at not being able to help, guilt at going behind Matt’s back—not that they _had_ gone behind his back. Matt had known what they were doing. It still felt like an invasion of privacy.

Pidge shrugged, then licked their lips. “I guess so, yeah.”

“Is this about the Galra?”

A lump lodged in Pidge’s throat, stopping their voice. They nodded, reluctant.

Matt was silent for a long while, his chest rising and falling in steady rhythm. When he spoke again, his voice was the faintest rumble against Pidge’s ear. “Is this about the research logs?”

Pidge’s arms pulled tighter around Matt before they could figure out whether or not to admit the truth.

Matt sighed, running his fingers through Pidge’s hair. They pulled back, afraid to look at him but needing to see if he was mad at them for—for they didn’t know what. They just knew they had to see his face.

He wasn’t mad, as Pidge had known he wouldn’t be mad, but he did seem tired, and older than he really was. Shiro and Allura were watching him silently, eyes wide. Matt glanced at them both, then down at Pidge. He forced a smile.

“Sorry,” he said. “I knew I shouldn’t have let you dig through that old stuff.”

The tangle of emotions faded, temporarily, as anger took center stage. Pidge sat up straight and glared at Matt. “That’s _not_ what I’m upset about,” they snapped. “I’m mad about what they did to you.”

Matt’s smile turned sad, which was ironically more genuine and more comforting than his attempt at cheerfulness. “I know, Pidge, but that’s all in the past now.”

“I know,” Pidge said. It was over and done with, and there was nothing to do but move forward. Pidge got that, even if they weren’t happy about it. They slumped sideways, resting their head on Matt’s shoulders. “I just wish I could change things so you didn’t have to go through it in the first place.” Groaning, they scrubbed at their eyes. “You don’t happen to have an ancient Altean time machine lying around, do you, Allura?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said, a thin veneer of humor covering her concern. Pidge doubted she knew what Matt had gone through. They doubted even Shiro knew, as tight-lipped as Matt was.

Guilt curled around Pidge’s heart and squeezed. “Sorry,” they muttered. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No,” Matt said. He smoothed the hair back from Pidge’s forehead and smiled down at them. Tired, careworn, the kind of face their mother had worn when she sat up half the night with Pidge when they had the flu. “It’s all right, Pidge. I’ve been talking about it with Keith, anyway, and… It’s getting easier. Talking. Accepting what happened.”

Pidge pulled back, frowning at him. “Really?”

Matt nodded. His eyes traveled one final circuit around the table, then settled on the abandoned card game. “Turns out it’s actually pretty easy to talk about--there’s not a whole lot to say. I sat in a cell for a while, and then they locked me in an E-dep chamber for what felt like forever but realistically couldn’t have been more than a few weeks.”

Pidge could tell Allura and Shiro were trying to contain their reactions. Shiro, who was mostly confused and just a little alarmed, fared a little better than Allura, who had gone red in the face and looked like she was trying very hard not to shout.

“The E-dep chambers?” Shiro asked, oblivious to Allura’s apoplexy. “What’s that?”

“Quintessential deprivation,” Allura said, her voice almost managing to sound normal. “You’re telling me you were _in_ there? For _weeks_?”

 _Months._ Pidge resisted the urge to correct her.

Matt grimaced. “Yes.”

“How are you still alive?” Allura asked.

Matt shrugged. “I’ve been trying to figure that out. Keith thinks humans must be one of the rare species that produces enough Quintessence to survive without another source. It’s the only answer we’ve been able to come up with. And, I mean... It makes sense. I imagine the space program would have hit a few snags by now if humans couldn't survive away from Earth for more than a few days.”

Allura frowned. “I suppose. Fortunate for you…” She shook her head. “Well. That doesn’t matter now. Are _you_ all right?”

“Yeah.” Matt lifted his head, squeezing Pidge’s arm. “I am. I used to think talking about it would make it harder to let go, but… I’m not sure anymore. It’s not easy, I don’t know if it will ever be, but… It helps. Talking about it. Not letting it control me.”

For some reason, Allura’s eyes flickered to Shiro then, and though Shiro didn’t look back at her, his mouth tightened.

Matt, of course, noticed the exchange. “What?” He glanced briefly at Allura, then returned his attention to Shiro. “You have something you want to talk about, don’t you?”

“I…” Shiro hesitated, then nodded. “Yeah, I guess I do.” Matt gestured for Shiro to go ahead, and Shiro took a deep breath. “Haggar put something in my arm that lets her take control.”

It was like Pidge’s bayard had discharged in the space between them and Matt. Both sat upright, sucking in sharp breaths. Pidge’s skin tingled, and Matt reached around Pidge to seize both of Shiro’s wrists. His hands were shaking.

“She _what_?” Matt hissed. His knuckles blanched from holding Shiro so tight, but Shiro appeared not to notice the hold. “I’m going to fucking _murder_ her.”

Pidge hadn’t seen Shiro tense, but they saw when he relaxed, his hands turning to catch Matt’s wrists in a softer grip. “It’s okay, Matt. She has to be close to take control, and I’ve barely been around her since she put it in. After the first time… Keith was there. He got me away from her. The only other time was on Berlou, and that didn’t work like it was supposed too. Haggar was too far, I guess.”

He shuddered, then went on in a brighter tone. “I had Coran run some scans, but I was wondering if you—both of you—could help him figure out where the override is. No reason to leave a window open for her, right?”

Matt was silent for two heartbeats before he lurched forward to hug Shiro. Pidge was caught in between them, but honestly? They didn’t mind. It gave them an excuse to get in on the cuddle-pile, which was nice. A handful of broken people all clinging to each other way out in the darkness of space. It was almost poetic, even if it did make Pidge’s chest ache.

“Of course we’ll help,” Matt said. “Right, Pidge?”

“Obviously.” Pidge would have been glad for anything that took them away from the research logs and the gut-wrenching things the Galra had done to Matt—and this was something they could really dig into. Their mind was already working, spinning out theories on what made the arm tick. Frankly, they’d been dying to get a peek inside since Shiro had showed up on Berlou. “I’ll have that thing cracked in no time.”

Matt pulled back, arching an eyebrow. “A race, then? You try to find the override in the code, I’ll look on the schematics?”

Pidge grinned. “Winner does the loser’s chores for a month.”

“You’re on, pipsqueak.”

“Pipsqueak!” Pidge snorted. “You’re, like, two inches taller than me.”

Sticking out his tongue, Matt ruffled Pidge’s hair. “You can talk when you hit your growth spurt. _If_ you hit your growth spurt. And not a moment sooner.”

“Whatever keeps you happy, old man.”

* * *

The Yellow Lion was as steady and as awe-inspiring as always. Shay halted just inside the hangar, staring up at the mighty beast. As always, a thread of the lion’s Quintessence reached out across the space to greet Shay. It was a quiver in her chest, a song just beyond sound.

Shay glanced at Hunk. “Do you truly think she has chosen me?”

“Only one way to find out,” he said, but he was smiling as though there were no question at all, as though Shay had already proved herself worthy of a place at his side.

His confidence gave her the courage she needed to step forward.

She noticed the change at once. Always before, the Yellow Lion’s Quintessence had remained at a distance. Watchful, yes. Aware. But never _alive_ as it was now.

It unfurled toward her, first one thread and then another. Shay raised her palm, hand up, and let the Quintessence gather there, intermingling with her own as a timid blue glow spread across her skin. Within the Quintessence were a hundred questions, a thousand silent invitations. Shay saw the possibilities open up before her, spread out like veins beneath her Balmera’s stony skin.

 _You need only embrace it,_ whispered a voice in her heart.

It was only then that Shay realized the Yellow Lion had moved. Hunk had fallen over, gaping up at his lion, who stood now directly over Shay, golden eyes blazing. Shay’s head was tipped all the way back to look into those eyes, so much so that her neck had begun to hurt.

She didn’t move, just let the ancient presence fill her with strength not her own and lifted her hand to press it against the lion’s chin.

 _I will try,_ she told the Yellow Lion. _I do not know if it will be enough, but… I do wish to try._

A rumble shook her head to toe, like the shuddering warmth of her family’s laughter filling their home. _I ask no more than this,_ the lion said, then lowered her head. With a gust of warm, oil-scented air, her mouth opened, a ramp extending to within inches of Shay’s toes.

Hunk scrambled to his feet and grinned at Shay, who let her anticipation build for only a moment longer before she hastened up the ramp. The cockpit was as it had always been, at once dark and bright, viewscreens flickering to life at her approach.

One thing had changed, and one thing only. The pilot’s seat, formed and proportioned for a human, looked larger now. It was set back from the controls, a distance more comfortable for Shay’s longer arms, and there was a gap in the fold to accommodate her tail.

Shay smiled, an undignified sound escaping her, and she went to sit in the seat that had been prepared for her. Hunk, laughing, stood behind her.

“Okay, okay,” he said, excitement aflutter in his voice. “What do you know about flying?”

“Um...” Shay stared down at the controls, her giddiness diminishing. “Nothing...”

Hunk inhaled through his nose, his fingers held up like tiny twin laser pistols. On the exhale, he pointed both at Shay. “Okay. Crash course. This--”

He leaned forward, hand outstretched toward toward one of the many levers extending from the dashboard. The lever, however, shimmered as his hand neared, then vanished altogether. Hunk’s hand fell on empty space.

Confused, Shay turned to Hunk. “Was… that intentional?”

“No.” Hunk frowned. “I...” Glancing upward, he pursed his lips. “Okay, I’ve lost systems before, but never like _that_.”

Even as he spoke, another lever disappeared—one of those that controlled the lion’s movement, if Shay was not mistaken. She could not see how she was supposed to fly without it.

But Yellow was not done yet. More levers vanished, an entire panel of buttons receded into the dash. Shay stretched out a hand as though that might bring it back, then hesitated. “I do not understand. Does she not want me here?”

“No, no way.” Hunk shook his head firmly. “She wants you here, I know it. I just… What’s that?”

Shay followed his gesture and saw that a new panel had appeared at the heart of the dashboard—now cleared of all controls, save for a smooth plate like a mirror. A light flashed within this plate, golden-yellow in the outline of a pair of hands.

Shay reached forward, not without a measure of hesitation, and placed both hands on the new plate. For a moment, she felt nothing. She reached for her Quintessence and shaped it beneath her palms.

For a moment, every light in the cockpit dimmed, so the blue Quintessence haze seemed bright enough to blind.

Then the panel responded, swallowing her glow with the yellow of her lion, and Shay’s mind brushed one much more vast than even her Balmera. Thoughts drifted past, first as images—fleeting and disorienting—but Yellow soon got the measure of Shay, and the images became a song, low and crooning.

Shay smiled. “I see.”

“What? You figured it out?” Hunk leaned forward, his hand cupped around his chin. “What is it? What’s she doing?”

“She is singing,” Shay said, and responded with a song of her own, a song not of voice but of Quintessence.

The Yellow Lion stood, roaring her song for the whole castle to hear. Shay’s eyes fluttered closed as she sank into the bond, drifting away from flesh and bone, letting herself be pulled by the tug of Quintessence. A new world opened up around her, smaller than her home but every bit as complex.

They loped together down the tunnel to the bay doors, Shay and Yellow in harmony. Balmera did not have eyes, so it was strange to look through Yellow’s, watching as space opened up around her. Yet at the same time, it felt as if she had been doing it for many lifetimes.

“Woah.” Hunk’s word came on an exhale, a tickle at Shay’s ear, a deeper tug within Yellow. “How are you doing that?”

Shay turned, curving around the tower from which she had emerged, and led Yellow in a dance toward the glowing engines at the castle’s base. Yellow sensed a fraction of Hunk’s awe, a surface sampling only, like knuckles brushed across a wall, the contact too light for real conversation.

Even that small impression was enough to make Shay’s blood warm in shame and in pride. “What do you mean?”

Hunk flailed, his mouth working soundlessly. “ _This_! Flying! You don’t have any controls.”

“I do not need them,” Shay said. She opened her eyes—her own eyes—and let the union lapse for a moment to look back at Hunk. “She knows what I wish, and she responds. Why should I make it more complicated than that?” Hunk looked overawed, and Shay allowed herself a laugh. “I am no pilot, Hunk, but the lion _is._ Why not let her fly?”

And fly she did, soaring and twirling around the castle in a dizzying dance. The elation of it filled Shay to bursting, and she laughed aloud as they turned and charged out into open space. Behind her, Hunk whooped and hollered, somehow _more_ excited than Shay.

When at last Yellow slowed, drifting now lazily among the stars, Hunk grasped Shay by the shoulders. Her skin heated under his touch, and she pulled out of her connection with the lion. The viewscreen ahead of them was full of stars—so many and so bright it called tears to her eyes.

“It is beautiful,” she whispered.

“Yeah,” Hunk said in an odd voice. Shay turned and found him looking at her. “It is.”

* * *

Keith lost track of how long he spent standing in the elevator, his finger hovering over the button for the fifth floor. He should just go down there and get it over with.

 _Yeah, like it was ever going to be that easy._ For the first time years, he had a chance to talk to other Galra who didn’t whole-heartedly support Zarkon’s war. Galra his own age, in some cases. All he had to do was push the button and then just… strike up a conversation. Somehow.

_Hey, heard you got thrown in prison. That sucks. Who, me? No, no, I joined the army. Bloodthirsty Keith, that’s me! But I defected after that, and now I’m a paladin, so it’s cool._

Yeah. That would probably go over about as well as it had back when he was first trying to convince the paladins he was on their side. No, worse than that, because the Galra downstairs had no reason to trust _any_ of the paladins. Sure, they’d rescued them, but to what end?

He should wait a few days. Let the freed prisoners adjust. Let the ones who wanted to leave leave, so the only ones he stood a chance of running into were the ones who’d decided Team Voltron was trustworthy. Or… more trustworthy than the universe at large, anyway.

Groaning, Keith let his hand drop and rested his forehead against the smooth metal panel over the controls.

“You’re too tired for this, Keith,” he muttered. “Just go to bed. You can try again tomorrow.”

It was probably the best option, but before Keith could push the number six button, the doors whispered shut and the elevator began to descend.

Keith stumbled, caught off guard by the sudden motion, and glanced frantically up at the floor display.

7…

6…

5…

The doors slid open.

Keith didn’t have time to curse, however much he wanted to, because one of the rescued Galra was standing there, blinking.

“Oh. Sorry, I wasn’t expecting—Wait.” She leaned forward, her membranous ears twitching. Unlike Keith, she was furless, her skin striped lavender and indigo, her eyes small and close-set. Though she was built like a typical Galra—a head taller than Keith, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested—she didn’t look much older than Keith. Not that he was good at guessing other people’s ages, even without the form-fitting prison jumpsuits and long, matted hair that made all the prisoners look impossibly young or much older than they were.

Seconds passed as the young woman continued to scrutinize Keith, her stubby nose scrunched up in thought.

“Can… I help you?” he asked slowly.

She blinked, as if she’d forgotten what it was she was doing. Her ears swiveled back, embarrassed, then pricked up again as she met his eyes—or tried to, anyway. Keith quickly turned his eyes back to the elevator controls. Maybe he should just go.

“You’re him, aren’t you?”

He turned back to her, frowning. “Him?”

“The Galra paladin.”

Keith glanced down at himself. He’d changed out of his armor after the mission, of course, but he was still the only Galra in the castle right now not dressed in a prison jumpsuit or mismatched Altean salvage. “Uh… yeah? That’s me.”

Now the girl was frowning again, one claw tapping against her chin as she tilted her head this way and that.

“Do you have a problem with that?” Keith asked. He could feel his fur beginning to stand on end, and it was all he could do not to press a button at random and watch the elevator doors close in this girl’s face.

Her brow furrowed. “Sorry. It’s just… Do I know you?”

Keith blinked. “I don’t think so?”

“No, I swear you look familiar. What did you say your name was?”

He hadn’t, and he had half a mind not to tell her now, but she was still staring at him like a specimen in a jar, and he couldn’t hold out forever. “...Keith.”

“Keith?” She straightened, clapping her hand over her mouth. “ _Keith_? The legacy Prince Keith?”

Keith flinched. “Not anymore.”

She screamed and lurched forward to fling her arms around his neck. “Oh, krel. I _knew_ I knew you!”

“You… do?” With a little bit of squirming, Keith managed to get a hand between them, and he shoved the girl away.

She crossed her arms, looking put out. “Uh, _yeah._  I’m Zuza?” She waited, eyes unblinking, and her ears wilted when Keith didn’t respond. “Zuzroka? Lieutenant Tetlok’s daughter?” She leaned forward. “We were in the same class on the _Reaper_?”

Keith frowned. “We were?”

Zuza’s mouth dropped open, and she nearly fell over. She caught herself on the edge of the elevator, straightened, and pouted at Keith. “ _Yes_. I washed out at the end of second year. We were partners on the first day of training!”

“Oh.” Keith frowned. “Sorry, I don’t remember you.”

Sighing loudly, she grabbed him by the arm and hauled him out of the elevator. “I’d say I’m offended, but I’m pretty sure you forgot the entire class’s names by the second week.”

Well, she wasn’t wrong. Keith let Zuza pull him out of the elevator, then carefully extricated his arm. “You looked like you were going somewhere,” Keith said pointedly. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Don’t be stupid. I was just bored, so I was gonna explore, but now _you’re_ here!”

Keith didn’t groan, but it was a near thing. “Lucky me.”

Laughing, Zuza twirled around and stopped in front of Keith, staring at him. She was surprisingly light on her feet for someone with such a solid frame. “So, what, you wash out, too? Bummer. I always thought you were clever enough to get over the scrawny thing.”

Keith had been about to inform Zuza that he had, in fact, passed training—not that it was anything to be proud about—but he stopped as the rest of her sentence registered. “S-scrawny?” he spluttered.

“Sure.” Zuza held out a hand at the level of Keith’s head. It barely reached her shoulder. “You always were a runt. They send you to the ganu mines?”

“For your information, I survived my Proof.” He was bristling now, and he knew it, his ears pinned back against his skull, his lip pulling back from his teeth. “I left a couple months ago and joined the paladins.” A truncated version of the truth, but he didn’t feel like getting into his whole life story.

Zuza looked impressed nevertheless. She whistled. “Wow. To think I know a real-life traitor.”

Keith growled, but Zuza just grinned. “What about you?” Keith asked. He didn’t particularly care, but it was the only way he could think to change the topic. “You don’t look like the physical training was too much for you.”

“Nah, not really.” She shrugged in a way that suggested eight years at a refinery on a frigid planetoid in the middle of dead space had been nothing more than a minor annoyance. “Haven’t got a problem with killing, really. I mean, in theory. Except no one ever gave me a good enough reason.”

“What, Zarkon’s laws weren’t good enough for you?” Keith asked dryly.

“All I’m saying is that once a ruler stops listening to his advisors, it’s all downhill to the shit heap. And you don’t exactly cultivate good advisors when the only argument that matters is _because Zarkon said so_.” She shrugged. “That’s just historical fact.”

Despite himself, Keith smiled. “Well, lucky for us our leaders aren’t afraid to listen to their subordinates.”

Zuza rocked back on her heels. “Good for them. Hey, this place doesn’t happen to have an archive room, does it? It’s just that I haven’t read a good book in _ages_.”

“Don’t worry,” Keith said. “Half the people here are nerds. I’m sure we can find something.”

* * *

Matt’s room seemed especially quiet that night. Impossibly quiet. Even the usual sounds of the castle were muted, like someone had tossed a blanket over the halls.

Thoughts spun out endlessly around him as he lay there, staring at the dim red light in the corner of the room, waiting for sleep to take him. Thoughts, mostly, of Vel-17—easier to face now, yes, but still not _easy_. Not in the dark of night when the weight of his blanket sometimes felt like the walls of a coffin closing in around him. Not when he was alone, when he doubted whether a cry for help would even make it beyond the bounds of his room.

The thoughts of Vel-17 weren’t the worst he faced tonight, though. Tonight he stewed over Pidge, still just fourteen and already bearing burdens most adults never had to take. He wished he could shield them from this, but he knew they wouldn’t appreciate the gesture.

Neither, he supposed, would Shiro. He couldn’t help it, though. Every time he thought of that _thing_ embedded in his arm, the switch Haggar could trip with a thought that would make Shiro a prisoner all over again, his hands shook with the kind of rage he hadn’t known he could feel until he met Zarkon’s followers. He wanted to tear Haggar’s arm apart, wanted to replace it with something he could be sure meant Shiro no harm.

A strangled laugh escaped him at that. As if he could build an entire _arm_. Not one anything like what Shiro already had, anyway. Nothing that would stand up in battle, nothing that would give him even a fraction of the functionality of what he had now. Even Coran was stumped by Haggar’s design, and he’d been fixing alien tech for far longer than Matt had been alive.

He lay there a few minutes more, trying to get his mind to quiet down enough for sleep, then gave up the effort and rolled out of bed.

The lights brightened ever-so-slightly as his bare feet touched the floor, a strip of red lining the path to the bathroom and to the door out. Matt fluttered his hand impatiently toward the sensor, groping towards it as he shuffled toward the door.

Even expecting the lights, they still stung his eyes when they turned on, and Matt groaned, squinting. He grabbed his glasses from the bedside table, tugged on his fleece jacket, and stepped into the lion-head slippers that apparently had been the height of Altean fashion at some point when the castle was in use.

He was out the door before he could talk himself out of this.

It was a bare twenty feet to Shiro’s door, but that was plenty of time to have second thoughts—foremost among them the fact that Shiro might already be asleep, and that Matt shouldn’t disturb him.

He stood awkwardly in the hallway for long enough that he started to blush, then groaned and let his head drop forward against the door. “Shiro?” he whispered. “Are you awake?” God, he sounded like a six-year-old who’d just had a nightmare.

He backed away from the door, feeling foolish, and turned to go back to his room. He’d spend the next four hours wrestling with his insomnia, but it was better than passing out outside Shiro’s room, where anyone might find him.

The door hissed open, and Matt froze.

“Matt?” Shiro’s hair was tousled, his pajamas askew, but he seemed alert. Their eyes met, and Shiro’s eyes softened. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

Matt stared at his feet, hoping the half-light of the hallway was enough to hide his blush. “My thoughts are shitty company tonight. Thought I might try to find a better alternative.”

Shiro held out his hand, and Matt took it, their fingers interlacing so naturally Matt felt a bit of his tension melt away even before Shiro pulled him inside.

* * *

_Keith didn’t remember the first time he’d met Lieutenant Commander Thace. It seemed, sometimes, that the man had always been there. He meant something to Keith’s mother, though Keith had never been able to put a name to their relationship. At first, he’d been too young to notice. Later, he knew Thace had been Keena’s commanding officer._

_But it was more than that. They knew each other. They confided in each other. Keith remembered hushed conversations, Thace standing protectively in front of Keena, Keena hitting him on the arm with a roll of her eyes and a muttered insult._

_He came to visit only rarely, and only ever when Keith’s father was not around—with one notable exception._

“ _How did she die?”_

_Keith was five, too young to remember the conversation clearly. He remembered Thace, though, tall and stone-faced, his eyes gleaming as they turned toward Keith._

“ _She thought to spare some rebels, and they turned on her. She died quickly.”_

“ _Then she got off easy,” Keith’s father spat._

_There might have been more, but if so, it was lost to time. The next thing Keith remembered was the door hissing shut behind his father, anticlimactic after the man’s fury. Thace lingered in the sitting room, Keith watching him from behind a chair._

_Thace sighed, and when he stood it seemed a great effort. Keith ducked down, but the motion drew Thace’s eyes, and he crossed to where Keith stood scuffing his foot along the floor._

_A beat passed, and then Thace reached down and unclipped a dagger from his belt. “This was your mother’s,” he said in a tone of voice normally reserved for secrets. He held out the dagger and pressed it into Keith’s arms. “She wanted you to have it. Keep it safe.”_

_The light in Thace’s eyes said this was not a request to be taken lightly._

_Keith nodded, shifting his hold so he didn’t drop the dagger. Thace’s stern face softened then, and he ruffled Keith’s hair before he straightened and walked out._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're not following me on Tumblr ([@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com)) or at least occasionally checking my [dualityverse tag](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/tagged/dualityverse) you're missing out on some quality content, ranging from a discussion of Galran swears to Akira having aliens #confirmed to my thoughts on a Duality crossover with my soulmate AU, _Love and Other Questions_. And of course you're always welcome to come at me on Tumblr with questions about my fics. My ask is always open. :)
> 
> Update: There's now a companion story to this chapter, telling Carmen Mendoza's side of events. I encourage you to go read it. ["Twenty-Five Days"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9640166)


	10. High Security

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The team found out Shay is the second yellow paladin. She's not sure she has what it takes, but flying Yellow was easier than she could have imagined. Keith went off wandering the castle and ran into Zuza, a refugee from Revinor who was in his training group in the Empire.
> 
> Meanwhile Pidge, upset over the things they've learned from the Vel-17 research logs, went to Matt. They talked about his experiences, and that led to Shiro opening up about the override Haggar planted in his arm. Matt and Pidge promised to help disable the override. Later that night, unable to sleep, Matt ended up seeking solace in Shiro's room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, all! Couple of quick things before we begin:
> 
> 1\. susie-d-applesauce drew [this adorable fanart](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/156992297659/susie-d-applesauce-i-really-like-this) of awkward Keith right after he got his new Earth-style clothes. Thank you so much, Suz!
> 
> 2\. I just wanted to let you all know that I'm LOVING seeing all the theories about the second green and blue paladins. So far we've got one vote each for: Sam Holt and Val Mendoza for green paladin; and Val Mendoza, Zuza, and Akira Shirogane for blue paladin. (What I'm gathering here is that y'all really like Val. ;) ) I'm not gonna say anything, but feel free to weigh in with your own theory if you've got one!

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1602  
>  Dated three days before the return of Voltron**
> 
> The seed crystal implanted in Subject 5Nn [Pidge’s note: Matt] is growing well. Eight additional crystals have been identified in the subject’s body, which is in line with projected metastasis rates.
> 
> With this success, the experiments on Subject 5Nn pass beyond the scope of the Vel-17 lab’s mission statement. Subject is scheduled for transfer to Hovent Sector lab on tomorrow’s transport.

* * *

The world was pain and darkness.

Someone moved beside him—several someones—but he couldn’t seem to open his eyes more than a sliver. All he could see were blurry shadows, darting about, and voices… words…

“…contact is… make our final preparations.”

A moan burbled out of him, as involuntary as breathing and nearly as painful. Everything hurt. Something cold flowed across his arm. Inside his arm?

The voices stopped.

“The sedatives...”

Footsteps drowned the rest of the sentence, but the world was spinning and he couldn’t make himself care that one of the shadows was now looming over him.

It spoke, but the words were lost to the darkness.

Something changed, and instead of darkness all was now light, bright and blinding. He tried to turn away, but found he couldn’t move. He was shaking, screaming, something was roaring in his ear and he knew there was pain coming if he couldn’t--

“ _Matt!_ ”

Matt jolted out of his dreams, every nerve alive with adrenaline. He sat upright, casting aside his blanket, and thrashed against the hands trying to hold him down.

The hand vanished. A light turned on.

A familiar room settled around him, familiar metallic walls, red lights glowing dim in the corners. He sat on a familiar bed, his glasses waiting for him on the bedside table, but something was wrong. Something was _different._

…Wasn’t his bed on the other side of the room?

Shiro eased into his line of sight, hands held up in a disarming gesture, and knelt on the floor beside the bed. The events of last night came back to Matt in a rush. His own room, large and lonely. Insomnia prickling inside his head.

Knocking on Shiro’s door, curling up beside him in the narrow bed, the welcome warmth of a familiar body beside his.

The last vestiges of terror faded, swiftly replaced with shame. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, curling in on himself and pressing his face to his knees. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Shiro said. His voice wasn’t as steady as it would have been in the daytime—still a little raspy with sleep, a little shaky from Matt’s flailing. “You looked like you were having a nightmare.”

Matt tried to laugh it off, carefully uncurling himself so he could face Shiro like a paladin, and not like a child who was afraid of the dark. “Yeah,” he said brightly, reaching out for his glasses. “Stupid, right?”

Shiro didn’t acknowledge Matt’s question, just looked up at him with sad, dark eyes. “I get nightmares too, sometimes. About the Arena.”

Matt’s smile froze on his face. “What?”

With a sigh, Shiro stood and sat beside Matt, careful to leave space between them. Matt knew it was because of the way he’d reacted to being roused, because of the fear and tension still creeping across his skin, but whatever gratitude he might have felt was lost in the overpowering grip of humiliation. He hadn’t wanted Shiro to see him like this—hadn’t wanted anyone to see him like this, lost and broken and so, so small.

“It hasn’t ever left me, the things they did.” Shiro let his hands rest on his knees, palms up, the fingers of his prosthetic hand gleaming in the light of the bedside table. “Some days I’m fine, sometime I can sleep through the night, but sometimes...”

“Sometimes you wake up and think you’re still there?” Matt asked bitterly.

“Yes.”

Their eyes met, and Matt finally recognized the darkness in Shiro’s gaze that was normally buried too deep to show. The darkness that sometimes appeared in Matt’s eyes—but only ever when he was alone with his reflection. There were scars, Matt knew, that ran deeper than scars of the flesh, but somehow he’d never considered that Shiro’s wounds might manifest as Matt’s own did, in dark dreams and hazy, sleepless nights.

Shiro’s brows knitted together, concern bald on his face, and Matt leaned into him, grasping at the fabric of his shirt. After a moment of surprise, Shiro pulled Matt closer, kissing his temple. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“There’s nothing to say.” Matt tilted his head up so he could rest his chin on Shiro’s shoulder. “I don’t really remember it… maybe one of the experiments they did? It was more the sensations. Pain… and fear.”

Restless anxiety crawled beneath his skin, cold and creeping. He breathed in and out and stared at the light on Shiro’s bedside table until he saw spots. _You’re here,_ he told himself. _The Castle of Lions. That’s all behind you now._

Matt was no stranger to nightmares. He’d had them nightly for the first two weeks after his escape, a fact that he had borne in silence until the darkness began to recede. But they’d been getting better lately; he’d had a few uneasy dreams recently, but nothing bad enough to wake him since he’d begun diving into his bond with Keith. It had probably been the conversation with Pidge that had brought this one on—not that Matt had any intention of saying so to his sibling, or to anyone else for that matter. Better for him to lose a little sleep than for Pidge to deal with their new knowledge alone.

“What time is it?” Matt asked, rubbing eyes that were bleary with sleep.

Shiro leaned forward, keeping hold of Matt with one hand, and turned the clock toward him. “Four, castle time.”

Matt groaned into Shiro’s neck. “Well, that’s only a little early.” There would be no more sleep tonight, not after that nightmare, not with the adrenaline still surging through his veins. He pulled away from Shiro and kissed his cheek. “Sorry for the rude awakening. I think I’m gonna go for a walk, but you should try to get some more sleep.”

“It’s all right,” Shiro said, standing and stretching. “I’m usually up before first call, anyway.”

Matt couldn’t keep from snorting at that. Calling Coran’s traditional Altean sunrise anthem _first call_ was giving the man too much credit. Allura wanted them all on the same schedule, and Coran obliged her in the most obnoxious way possible.

Before Matt could make himself take more than a few shuffling steps toward the door, Shiro had made his bed, grabbed some clothes from the closet, and started the shower running. He paused at the bathroom door. “Meet you in ten?” he asked.

Matt grunted an affirmative, then headed back to his own room in search of a shower that might chase away the nightmare. He stood beneath the scalding cascade for fifteen minutes, then gave up on feeling human and hurried through the rest of his morning routine.

Shiro, of course, was waiting for him in the hallways, clean-shaven and dressed as sharp as though his shirt and jeans were a military uniform. Matt shook his head and elbowed him as they turned toward the elevators. “Quit trying to make the rest of us look bad, Shirogane.”

Frowning, Shiro glanced down at himself. “What?”

“Never mind.”

Allura found them in the dining room just as they were finishing breakfast. She seemed thoroughly unsurprised to see Shiro there, which suggested Shiro hadn’t been lying when he said he was usually up early. She did raise an eyebrow at Matt’s presence, though.

“Rough night,” Matt said simply, and Allura was kind enough to leave it at that. She served herself a bowl of food goo, then joined Shiro and Matt at the table and began discussing plans for the day.

“We’ll have to spend most of the day getting the freed prisoners on their way. A number of them have asked to be taken to a transit hub near the edge of Zarkon’s holdings where they’ll be able to disappear back into the empire. As for the rest,” Allura paused, tapping her spoon against the edge of her bowl. “Well, I don’t want to establish a precedent of giving shuttles away to every group of prisoners we rescue; we haven’t got all that many to spare, but I believe this case might warrant an exception.”

Shiro nodded. “I imagine the people who have managed to resist Zarkon’s advance will be… reluctant to accept Galra refugees.”

“And we wouldn’t expect any other prisoners to return to the very people who imprisoned them,” Allura said. “It’s all well and good that some of them are willing to risk it to get to their families, or to build a new life, or whatever it is they plan to do, but the rest of them will need a reliable form of transport.”

“It’s a good idea,” Shiro said. “Don’t you think so, Matt?”

Matt blinked, his mind slow to process the question. He’d been following the conversation with only half a mind, stirring his breakfast into a slurry that managed to be even less appetizing than regular goo. He looked up, flushing. “Sorry, what?”

He wished Shiro wouldn’t look at him like that, like he was fragile. Bad enough that Matt _felt_ like he was on the verge of breaking down; he didn’t need to see it confirmed in Shiro’s eyes.

“Are you feeling all right?” Allura asked. “You look--”

“I’m fine,” Matt said. “Just a little distracted. Sorry.”

Silence settled over them, and Matt was afraid Allura was going to ask him what had happened. But she seemed to understand that he didn’t want to talk about it, possibly because of the pointed look Shiro gave her. Whatever the case, she finished her breakfast in silence, then stood and clasped her hands before her. “I’ve been thinking,” she said. “And I believe it would be beneficial for you all to meet your predecessors.”

Matt sat up, fatigue clearing. “The previous paladins?”

Allura nodded. “It’s tradition for every paladin and every member of the royal line to keep an up-to-date memory profile on record with the castle. Coran says the last generation of paladins updated theirs just before they left to hide the lions—those who were still in a condition to do so,  anyway.” She paused. “If you think it might be helpful, I could take you down to the computer core.”

“That sounds _amazing_ ,” Matt said, bounding to his feet. “Think of all we could learn from them. Who was the last red paladin? They must know so much about piloting Red!”

“Her name was Keturah,” Allura said with a small smile. “And I do believe you two would get along quite well. She _also_ had a vicious sense of humor.”

Matt grinned, glanced at Shiro, who seemed interested—if not quite so overtly as Matt—and followed Allura out of the room. They headed up to the bridge, where Lance and Coran were deeply engaged in something on the main console. Matt thought for a second it might be something to do with the distress beacons, but then Lance slapped the table and cried, “Ha- _ha!_ I’ve got you now, Coran!”

“ _Do_ you?” Coran crossed his arms, thoroughly relaxed. “We’ll see about that.”

Matt glanced questioningly at Allura, who sighed. “Eshet,” she said. “Don’t ask. I don’t suppose either of you would care to join us?” she asked, raising her voice just slightly.

Coran grunted, and Lance actually shushed her.

“I’ll take that as a no,” Shiro said, amused.

“It’s Coran,” Allura said. “He’s been obsessed with that game for as long as I can remember.”

Matt watched the game curiously—or as much of it as he could see. Lance and Coran each had a monitor that seemed to display some kind of game board, or maybe a map. Smaller windows popped up every now and again, cramped with tiny Altean writing, and Lance or Coran would occasionally reach out to tap various markers on the screen. Game pieces, Matt thought, since they seemed to move at the players’ direction.

He didn’t have time to puzzle out more, for Allura had by this time opened a hatch in the floor and disappeared into the dark space below. Matt scurried after her, Shiro bringing up the rear.

They found themselves in a vast space dotted with faintly glowing glass tubes. They looked a little like the cryopods, if those were built to contain colorful nebulas instead of sick people. Matt had been down here only once before, briefly, after a Galra drone had broken in and tried to shut down the castle’s computers. Matt had been one of the people helping Allura search the castle for other drones, and she’d brought them here to show them what they were looking for.

Matt hadn’t had time to explore back then, but he did so now, turning slow circles as he wandered among the glass cylinders. It was peaceful down here, dark enough to soothe while still bright enough to see to the far corners of the room, where more cylinders waited—these ones dark except for one small prick of light at the center.

Brighter light flashed from the tube Allura had gone to. She’d laid her hand on the panel beside the glass, and the light had responded to her touch, spinning outward until it formed a nebula like those in the central cylinders.

The light flowed out of the cylinder and formed a humanoid shape in midair, a hologram of some sort. Matt watched with keen interest as the image resolved to the likeness of an Altean woman. She was tall and fair skinned, her pin-straight dark hair cascading down around her shoulders. There were a few wrinkles around her eyes, a few white hairs interspersed with the dark, and the markings on her cheek seemed bleached of color by the bluish tint of the hologram. They might have been purple, or maybe pink like Allura’s.

“Ah.” The woman’s eyes lit up as she caught sight of Matt, and she nodded toward him. “So you’re my successor.”

Matt’s steps slowed. He looked again, and realized the woman was indeed wearing paladin armor. The accents could easily have been red, though at first glance he’d mistaken them for black. “Uh… yeah? Hi.”

Allura smiled into her hand. “This is Keturah, the red paladin who served under my father. Keturah, this is Matt.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Matt raised an eyebrow. “You have? What was there a study packet I should’ve gone over before I came down here?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels. “Awkward...”

Shiro swung his elbow, jostling Matt. “It’s very nice to meet you, Keturah,” Shiro said, his eyes darting to Allura before they settled back on Keturah. “If you served under King Alfor, you must have known Allura well.”

Smiling, Keturah shot Allura an unreadable look. “I did. Knew her penchant for trouble more than most, I’d wager.”

“Oh, come now,” Allura said, flushing slightly. “That was a long time ago.”

But Matt’s interest had been piqued. “Wait, did you know Allura when she was a kid? Do you have any embarrassing stories?”

“ _Matt_ ,” Shiro said, his voice all serious leader but his eyes every bit as curious as Matt. “You don’t need to answer that,” he said to Keturah.

The hologram smiled tightly. “Indeed.” Her gaze returned to Matt, cooler than it had been before, and Matt wondered if he’d somehow offended her already. Was this really the red paladin? She seemed much too stuffy for the Red Lion’s tastes—but maybe things had been different ten thousand years ago. Or maybe Matt and Keith were the ones who broke the mold. “Surely you have more useful questions for me. About the Red Lion, or our duty as paladins?”

Matt nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah. _Tons_.” He paused. “Is this normal? Talking to a hologram of the last paladin? Did you learn like this?”

“I trained under the red paladin who preceded me,” Keturah said. “He instructed me while he was still alive, and continued to impart his wisdom even after he yielded the Red Lion to me.”

“This is something of a...unique situation.” Allura pressed her palm flat against the glass of Keturah’s memory tube, a distant look on her face. “Ever since Voltron was first created, there have always been more experienced paladins for the new pilots to learn from. Admittedly, this isn’t ideal—a memory profile cannot spar with you, or join you in the cockpit to offer advice.”

Keturah clucked her tongue. “Your Highness, you make it sound as if this form is next to useless. It is true I cannot interact with the living outside this room—unless you were to reinstate hologram privileges on the main computer, that is. But I can still glean information from the security system. I have been watching your efforts on the training deck, young Matt. Very impressive, especially considering the physical challenges you must overcome.”

Tension stretched Matt’s smile thin. “You mean the crystals?” he asked, and continued before the hologram could say otherwise. “Yeah, well, Shay’s got that under control. Thank you, though. It’s nice to know I’m not a complete letdown—I know I’m not exactly the universe’s greatest warrior.”

“None of us are,” Keturah said. “Certainly not when we first begin. Fortunately, the uses of Voltron extend far beyond mere violence.”

Shiro nodded thoughtfully. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas about the crystals, since you’ve been watching and all.”

Keturah’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. The whole image shivered, then froze, as if someone had pressed pause. It creeped Matt out, and he inched closer to Shiro.

“Oh, quiznak,” Allura muttered. “Sorry, I forgot to mention. The memory profiles can store and recite facts they’ve learned since the last memory download, but they’re not very good at synthesizing that information. If you ask a question about something the real Keturah knew nothing about, the hologram will glitch.” She gave half a shrug, her eyes still on Keturah's hologram. “Keturah, can you tell us about the first time you piloted the Red Lion?”

A semblance of life returned to the hologram’s eyes, but it was less convincing now that Matt had seen just how hollow it really was. It reminded him more of a Galra sentry than a living person, which shouldn’t have stung the way it did. These memory profiles were still amazing resources, even if they were more like libraries than actual mentors.

Still, it didn’t take long for Matt to get lost in Keturah’s retelling of a battle on some far-distant planet. It was supposed to be a routine training exercise but—as seemed to be par for the course with paladins—it had soon turned into a fight for survival against some monstrous space worm.

It was entertaining, if nothing else. He’d have to bring Pidge down here later. For now, though, he listened and hoped he might learn something more of what it meant to be a paladin of Voltron.

* * *

Thace kept a sharp eye out for a chance to tell Dez what he had learned, but Prorok kept too tight a watch on his prisoners. The cameras in the corners of Thace’s cell—as well as those in the hallway outside—glared at him with their small red lights, reminding him how easily he could tear down everything he'd spent the last twenty years building.

The best he could manage was a quick squeeze of Dez’s hand one morning when she came to ask him for the access codes to his personal messenger profile. (He gave them, of course; he never sent anything potentially damaging from his official account, and never without at least two layers of encryption.)

Dez had slowed, her eyes locking with Thace’s, and he leaned forward to lend more weight to his words. “Are you ever going to let me tell my side of the story?”

She blinked once, pulled her hands away, and snorted. “Never heard anyone _ask_ for an interrogation,” she muttered, but she waved a hand over her shoulder as she left. “If I need you to fill in any gaps in our knowledge, I know where to find you.”

He only had to wait a day for Dez to answer his implicit request, but it was one of the longest days Thace could remember. Keena’s son—Thace’s nephew, for Altea’s sake!—was out there, unaware of the enemy eyes following his every movement. Had Zarkon already made his move? Thace tried to think how long it had been since he’d seen confirmation of Voltron’s movements, and the safety of the second red paladin.

Dez didn’t come personally to escort Thace to the interrogation, which wasn’t especially surprising. She was captain of Internal Security, not some errand girl. The procession escorting Thace met her in a small, thick-walled interrogation chamber. A single spotlight illuminated the chair at the center of the room—a sturdy, solid hunk of metal. Its restraints were not yet out, but Thace knew they could be deployed in an instant if the questioner wanted to exert a little more pressure on the one under investigation.

Thace sat calmly on the seat, curling his hand around the armrests. Dez’s men didn’t react to the gesture, but Thace knew they would understand the implication. Thace didn’t need to be forced to cooperate. He sat easily on the chair that could become a trap because he knew such measures were not needed.

Dez flicked a hand toward the guards. “Leave us,” she barked.

They did, and Dez retreated to the shadows beyond the circle of light around Thace. It was a short distance, but the harsh lighting made Dez all but invisible, just a silent, faceless silhouette prowling the edges of the room.

“You oversaw the reconnaissance team at Grulke, Lieutenant Thace, is that correct?”

“It is,” Thace said calmly. He wasn’t sure where Dez was headed with this, but he was willing to play along, at least for now.

“And did you have any contact with the locals?”

“Prior to our victory? No.”

“What about in System T23?”

“No,” Thace said.

Dez hummed thoughtfully. “You did not transmit any files to the local resistance?”

“No.” Thace kept his face blank only with an effort. He _hadn’t_ been in contact with the locals on either of those planets, as Dez surely knew. Had he _actually_ been framed for a treason other than the ones he had committed for the resistance? Or was this part of Dez’s plan, diverting the investigation to safer avenues? He tried to glean some information from Dez’s questions, even as he answered them simply and directly. Was there some code in her words? Not likely. Spoken codes were far too easy to miss. Perhaps she expected him to understand some reference to a past job?

He didn’t have long to wait before he found his answer. Shortly after the interrogation began, the lights suddenly went dark.

The restraints built into the chair automatically closed around Thace’s wrists and ankles, a safety mechanism built into the room in case of sabotage. Thace’s heart leaped into his throat—and Dez charging at him, her claws digging suddenly into his shoulders, didn’t help with the fright.

“What--?” he began.

“Shut up,” Dez snapped. “We don’t have much time. I’ve nearly cleared you, Thace, but somebody spotted a pattern in security breaches and tied it back to your work in the archives. Not even Prorok puts much stock in it, and you know how he--”

“I don’t care about that.” Thace wished he’d had his hands free so he could physically stop the words coming out of Dez’s mouth. “We need to find a way to contact the Castle of Lions.”

Dez’s brows knit together. “Because of Jost? I know. I’m working on it.”

“What? No.” Thace shook his head. _No time for questions._ “No. I found something in the archives. Haggar’s tracking the Champion. You have to let Voltron know.”

Dez’s eyes got wide, but she didn’t have a chance to press him for more details. The lights came on at that moment, and she jerked away from the chair, turning toward the cameras with a fair show of irritation. As she began to rant about faulty wiring and inferior security protocols, Thace tuned her out.

He had, at least, shared the worst of what he’d learned. Dez would get the information where it needed to go, and faster than Thace would be able to.

In exchange, he’d received only more worries. Jost… What had she been saying about Jost? He was another operative, one of the few Thace knew about. He was stationed on a different warship, but he and Thace and Dez had coordinated a series of sabotages a few years ago. Had something happened to him? Had he been found out? Could that have been what led them back to Thace?

He had no answers, and no way to find them until Dez cleared his name. As frustrating as it was, he was just going to have to wait until his fortunes changed. Thace hated being patient. Twenty years of spying had made him good at it, but he didn’t enjoy it any more now than he had as a youth.

But he would do what had to be done, for the good of the universe. He would do it, because his sister would have done the same.

* * *

Lance stared at his board in frustration. His pieces were all but backed into a corner—not beaten, not yet, but clearly overwhelmed by Coran’s forces. And here he’d thought he was doing well.

Once more, Lance scanned the board, tapping a few of his pieces—and Coran’s—and bringing up detailed information in a futile attempt to find some clever solution. His eyes ached from the effort of making Pidge’s augmented translator work for him, and he wondered whether he should try to learn at least a little Altean if he was going to keep on with this game. (This frustrating, unfair, unwinnable game.)

“I think I’m starting to see why Zarkon accused you of cheating,” he muttered, tapping his… well, the translator couldn’t seem to decide whether to call it a queen or a _rhialese_ , but either way, he gathered it was the most important piece. It was down to one point of health, its movement impeded by damage sustained in the battle, and its weapon was down to its last charge.

Coran chuckled, scrolling through distress beacons as he waited for Lance to make a move. It wouldn’t have been half as frustrating losing to Coran if he’d at least _pretended_ he needed to pay attention.

At length, Lance sighed and pressed the icon in the corner that signified surrender. “Alright, alright. You win.”

“I’d say I’m surprised,” Coran said, beaming as his screen lit up with the victory animation, “but I _do_ have a bit of a head start on you.”

“I guess.” Lance leaned back, popping his spine over the back of his chair. “I still can’t believe your ‘ancient and noble’ Altean strategy game is just competitive D&D in space.”

“Dee-and-dee?” Coran asked, enunciating carefully. “What’s that? Some human thing, I take it.”

Lance grinned. “It’s eshet,” he said, “except you usually have a group of people who each only control one character, and there’s usually a story that goes along with it.”

“Did you want a story? There are some eshet cycles that follow famous military campaigns, if you want to try that.”

Grimacing, Lance flicked through the stats sheets on the troops in this match. Health, armor, attack, agility, skills and abilities… it really did look like a character sheet. There was even a little bar in the corner that looked suspiciously like an experience point tracker—grayed out now, since they’d been playing a one-off match.

It wasn’t like Coran and Lance’s armies had been unbalanced. Coran was just better at the game. He knew what sorts of things were possible—which was to say, anything. Forget video games; there was nothing like a good old-fashioned tabletop RPG to let you flex your creative problem solving muscles. The game had let Lance turn one of his ships into a bomb, spend four turns recruiting new allies, and even order one of his units to throw his helmet at an opposing soldier once Lance began to run low on ammo.

“Maybe once I’ve got the hang of the system,” Lance said. “I think I need a few more practice games before I’m ready for the big leagues.”

Coran grinned and patted him on the shoulder. “You’re doing fine. Eshet takes some time to get used to. Maybe we could--”

A crackle of static interrupted whatever Coran had been about to say. A garbled sound—a voice maybe, but speaking a language the castle couldn’t translate—filled the bridge.

“What is that?” Lance asked, covering his ears with his hands. “And why the heck is it so _loud_?”

“I’m… I’m not sure.” Coran turned to the comms controls, fingers navigating deftly through a series of menus. The sound changed in pitch, then dulled like it was coming through thick padding, but it still sounded garbled.

The more Lance listened to it, the less it sounded like words.

Seconds later, the hatch in the floor burst open and Shiro, Matt, and Allura came charging up, tensed for a fight.

“What’s that noise?” Allura demanded.

“That’s what _I_ asked!” Lance started a gesture, then decided his ears needed his hands more than his words did. “Coran, turn it down!”

“I’m trying.”

Abruptly, the sound cut out. Lance waited a moment before, cautiously, lowering his hands. “Is it over?”

“Hmm.” Coran paused, then swiped aside several windows. “Strange.”

Matt stepped up beside him, frowning at the window he’d stopped on. A mess of wiggly lines filled the window, spiky and tangled like a spiderweb stuck full of pushpins. “Is that… some kind of encrypted signal?” Matt asked.

“I think it is. Unfortunately, I don’t recognize the encryption.” Coran paused, then traded looks with Matt. “We may need Pidge for this one.”

* * *

“I’ve never seen anything like this!” Pidge cried, sounding considerably more excited by that fact than the rest of them. Lance lingered in the back with Hunk, letting the techies geek out over the mystery signal. (Well, in all honestly, Hunk looked ready to join the others, but he stayed with Lance out of loyalty.) “Some kind of multi-layered audio encryption. It sounds like a voice, but it’s actually a _text file_.”

It was weird to watch them flitting around like that, suddenly full of energy. When they’d trudged out of the elevator from the Green Lion’s hangar, Keith at their side, they’d seemed almost dead on their feet, bags beneath their eyes speaking to a sleepless night. Or several.

Now, though, they looked like they’d slept a full eight hours and then had a shot of espresso.

“Okay, okay.” Lance fluttered a hand in their direction. “But what does it _say_?”

Pidge typed out a new sequence. “The program’s almost done. I’ll put it up on the screen.”

The bridge’s viewscreen darkened, and a moment later words appeared.

_Greetings, Voltron. I am an agent of the Accords, an organization that seeks an end to Zarkon’s empire. My comrades desire an alliance, and we had hoped to contact you first with an opportunity to discuss our shared ambitions._

_Unfortunately, Zarkon does not wait for our plans. I come to you with a warning—and an urgent request. One of my men has been discovered and is being questioned even now on a Galra prison ship called_ Seeker _. Our resources are not unlimited, and none of our operatives is in position for an extraction. I know you have no reason to trust us, but I assure you this man will have a great deal of information you will find useful in your fight. There is a chance the questioners do not yet know him for what he is, and I cannot risk exposing him by including his description here, but he will answer to the name Jost if it is a paladin of Voltron who speaks._

_Time is of utmost importance, and should you decide to aid us, you will need to move quickly. Unfortunately, another of our operatives has discovered files in the Empire’s systems that suggest the witch Haggar is tracking the Champion, the one you call Shiro. I do not know how, or whether there are limitations on this trace, but I urge caution in your activities, whether or not you choose to heed my requests._

_May the grace of the ancients be with you._

— _Hythan of the Accords_

A long silence followed as the paladins and Coran read and re-read the message. Coran and Allura stood rigid, eyes locked on the message on the screen. Shay looked troubled, and Pidge was still geeking out over the encryption.

Everyone else was looking at Shiro, or trying very hard not to. Lance was one of the few staring openly, so he saw the warring emotions on Shiro’s face, roiling for several agonizing seconds before the usual calm returned. Shiro closed his eyes for an instant, breathed in, and looked around at those who weren’t bothering to hide their concern—Keith, Matt, and Lance himself.

Their eyes locked, and half-formed words of comfort died on Lance’s tongue.

 _Tracking him._ Lance wanted to swear. He was still trying to wrap his head around last night's revelation—an override chip that had not immediately surfaced, despite the combined attention of all four resident geniuses. Now this? It was cruel. Lance wished Haggar was here so he could sock her good in the nose for everything she’d done to Shiro.

But she wasn’t here, and Shiro was slowly but determinedly beating back whatever pity might have been slung his way.

“Can we trust this?” he asked. “This Hythan person—we don’t even know who they are. Pidge, can you track the signal back to its source?”

“I mean… it came through a Galra communications hub, but aside from the castle-ship, just about everything that’s strong enough for intergalactic transmission is going to be Galra.” They clicked through a few readouts, then shook their head. “No, sorry. There’s no way to tell from this end whether the Galra sent it, or whether the Accords people just hacked a satellite.”

“We can trust them,” Allura said. She sounded dazed.

Lance frowned at the back of her head. “Seriously? I have to be honest here, Allura, I expected you to be more skeptical about this.”

She didn’t answer, but Coran shook himself and turned to face them. “The Hythan Accords were an important even in Altean history, the unification of our planet’s nations under the royal line. But that’s ancient history—long before Zarkon’s time.”

“Wait.” Hunk held up his hands, frowning. “Are you saying an Altean sent this?”

Coran and Allura exchanged glances, hope warring with grief in their eyes. Lance could see that they wanted to say yes, but both were afraid to speak the words aloud. The Kera Rebellion had mentioned an Altean resistance, but they’d seen nothing so far to suggest that it was more than rumors. Coran and Allura had remained tight-lipped about it, as if by putting their hopes into words they would jinx the whole thing.

He supposed it made a certain amount of sense, after all they’d lost, but that didn’t make it any easier for Lance to watch them both dancing around something they both so obviously wanted to believe.

Lance spared them the need to say something either way. “If not an Altean, then someone who knows your history, right? Which means we probably want to meet these people eventually, anyway.”

“Which means helping them out with their little emergency,” said Keith. “Is that what you’re saying?”

“There are coordinates attached,” Pidge said. “They seem to point to an empty sector—no real Galra activity in the area, though there could be a cloaked fleet there or something.”

“Or it could truly be a prison ship,” Shay said. “In which case, even if this is a trap… do we not owe it to the prisoners to free them?”

Hunk’s eyes slid toward her, his brow furrowing. “It would mean a fight," he said softly. "You know that, right?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Shay nodded. “I am aware.”

“If we do this, we have to do it now,” Shiro said. He stared down at his prosthetic hand for a long moment, and his mouth tightened. “And as long as we’re trusting them about the prisoner, we have to trust them about the rest, which means I won’t be able to accompany you.”

Allura turned, the shock of hearing from a maybe-Altean fading from her eyes. Something Lance couldn’t decipher passed between her and Shiro, and then she nodded. “They’ll want the castle as backup,” she said. “You and I will choose another target and see whether the Galra fleet shows up there.”

“Hang on.” Keith took half a step forward, one hand raised. “You’re not seriously thinking of walking into an ambush by yourself.”

“We won’t stay,” Allura said, a little snippy. “If the fleet shows up, we’ll run—at least then we’ll know that they are tracking Shiro.”

At the words, Shiro’s eyes closed, and Allura darted a look his way, her lips pursing.

Matt noticed, too, and he started to reach out for Shiro before he faltered and crossed his arms over his chest. “Consider it training, then,” he said brightly. “You two see how far you can stretch your weird telepathy thingy, the rest of us try a solo mission. Weren’t you saying this whole dual paladin thing might put us in a position to split up, take on multiple missions at once? This is the perfect time to try it.”

Awkward silence returned, and Shiro gave Matt a small smile. Lance waited a few seconds before he began to bounce restlessly on his toes. “So… we’re doing it, then?”

Allura glanced around the bridge. No one argued, and she nodded. “I suppose we are.”

* * *

It was amazing, the change a single week could bring.

Today was a lecture day, and as Akira stood at the front of the classroom, watching his students talk in small groups about the different classes of aircraft they might encounter in their jobs, he couldn’t help but notice the orange ribbons.

They were everywhere: pinned to backpacks, tied around wrists, woven into hair. Some people had wrapped their pencils point to eraser in ribbons or taped a band of ribbons to the back of their phone cases. Some were looped like a breast cancer awareness logo, but most were short, straight lengths of ordinary satin ribbon, the kind you might find in a fabric store.

More and more often, the ribbons came in knots of three.

Akira thought of the email that had gone out this morning from the dean of students, reminding teachers of the uniform policy, and that badges or pins of any kind were not permitted on Garrison property.

Well, fine. Over the course of the day, Akira had twice asked a student to remove the ribbons they had pinned to their shirts… then kindly suggested an alternative point of display. They’d gaped at him, then grinned, then started asking him whether he knew about the Garrison Three and what he thought and whether there really was a cover-up going on.

“I think it’s very admirable of you all to show your support for your fellow cadets,” he’d said coolly. “And that the faculty’s desire to avoid making a statement that the press might take as admission of guilt does not—and _should_ not—extend to the students.”

It was as close as Akira could come to what he really wanted to say, which was, _Iverson’s sweating like a glass of iced tea in the dead of summer, and I’ve never been so happy in my life._

One week, and it seemed everyone was talking about Karen’s spitfire confrontation with Iverson. Not just on campus, either. Akira had been to see Karen and Eli again this weekend, and they’d showed him the response they’d received online. Dozens of emails voicing support and sympathy. Comments on the video, posts on social media spreading the story.

Val’s disappearance had even made national headlines, which would have had Val equal parts delighted and deeply envious.

Akira glanced at the clock, then clapped his hands to get the students attention. “That just about does it for today, folks. Simulators again tomorrow—make sure you review the controls for the Koplar.”

As the students filed out, chatting, Akira heard more than one cluster discussing the training accident that had supposedly killed Lance, Hunk, and Pidge. Word of Pidge’s real identity had burned hot and fast, already swept away in the flood of more interesting rumors. The fact that Pidge had been spying on the Garrison was the only noteworthy part of the revelation now, it seemed, and it had earned them an almost cult-like awe from the other students.

Smiling to himself, Akira broke away from the crowd and headed to the teacher’s lounge. He still had grading to do, and he knew once he headed back to his bunk he was going to spend the rest of the night desperately trying to distract himself with movies and video games.

Someone else was in the teacher’s lounge when he arrived, a tawny-skinned woman Akira had never met. She wasn’t an instructor, unless Iverson had hired someone new since the last staff meeting.

But, no. She wasn’t grading papers or working on lesson plans, or even sipping coffee and staring dead-eyed at the wall, as Akira had known more than one of his coworkers to do after a long day. She sat in a chair by the window, looking out at the students streaming from the building. She wore her chestnut-colored hair in a bob, and her officer’s uniform was as crisp as if she’d just had it pressed.

When Akira entered, she turned, smiled, and stood to greet him.

“Akira Shirogane?” she asked, saluting. _Saluting—_ now that _was_ interesting. Did she not know Akira was outside the military heirarchy? Or was she trying to flatter him, acting like he outranked her? He scanned her uniform for an insignia, but like his own, her lapels were bare.

“That’s me. Can I… help you?”

She smiled, letting her hand fall. She stood with military posture, but her hands were clasped before her, rather than behind her back. It was as if she was used to military discipline, but not the particular formalities of the Garrison—though why, or what that meant, he wasn’t sure.

“My name is Naomi. I was hoping we could talk.”

“About what?” There was definitely something _off_ about this woman, though Akira couldn’t put his finger on _what_. She seemed about his age—early twenties. A recent graduate, if she’d even attended the academy here, but old enough to have gained some standing in Iverson’s heirarchy. He thought she might have been South Asian—Indian, maybe—but her accent didn’t sound quite right.

Her eyes, an uncanny shade of hazel, searched his face. “You’re making some very dangerous enemies, Akira.”

His heart thudded against his chest and he fought the urge to make a break for the hallway. “I’m sorry?”

She smiled wider when he glanced over his shoulder, afraid to find Iverson behind him, or more staff members lurking in the door. “Don’t worry. We’re alone here. I just wanted to warn you—and to offer my help.”

 _Like I’m going to trust you,_ he thought, frowning at her. He tried to keep the suspicion off his face, favoring a much more innocuous confusion. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Your investigation,” Naomi said. “I know some things that you might find… let’s go with _interesting_.” Seeing that he wasn’t jumping to take her up on her offer, she held up her hands. “Fine, fine. I get it. You’re not looking for a partner.” She paused. “Another partner.”

“Listen,” he began, but Naomi cut him off.

“It’s fine. Here.” She scrawled something on a napkin—a phone number, not local. “If you ever need help, call me. And Akira?”

He looked up from the napkin to find Naomi staring at him with a strange mix of pity and guilt.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

* * *

“All right, paladins, easy does it.”

Coran’s voice filtered through Hunk’s earpiece as he burrowed into the guts of the Galra ship, sabotaging every security system he could get to. The others answered in chorus, and somewhere deep in Hunk’s chest there was an echo of encouragement from Shiro and Allura. It was easier to identify their presence now that he knew what to look for, even if the distance between them dampened the connection somewhat.

Hunk didn’t know much about the system the black paladins had gone to, just that it had some minor Galra holdings and was far enough away that the comms didn’t work. At least, not without a delay, and that made the psychic lion bond the preferable option.

“Made it to the control station,” Pidge said in a low voice. “Accessing prisoner records now.”

If anyone else noticed the slightly sneaky note in their voice, they didn’t comment. Hunk opened his mouth to say something, then decided against it. If Pidge was up to something, chances were it either had to do with what the Galra researchers had done to Matt… or it had to do with their dad, Sam Holt, who was still missing.

Either way, none of Hunk’s business.

He found the system that supplied expanding foam to the escape-deterrent system and redirected a few valves. He’d probably have to find another way out, but it was better to clog the maintenance hallways with foam, as opposed to the main hallway, where the others had to go to reach the prisoner.

“Cameras are mine,” Pidge said. “The eyes on the cells are restricted to the commander’s station, but I can see everything else.”

“And I’ve got the first couple layers of security taken care of,” Hunk added. “I’m headed for the air ducts now. You said there’s two gas release points?”

Keith grunted. “Better look for three, just to be safe. If they hold suspected Altean spies here, chances are they’re running more than standard security.”

“Right.” Hunk continued on, trying not to be nervous at how smoothly this was going. Sure, they were just waltzing into a Galra high security prison like it was nothing, but they had Keith with them, who knew the inner workings of the Galra empire. That on top of Pidge, who could take control of any digital security with a laptop and five minutes to work.

Hunk just had to clean up the redundant systems, the ones that weren’t connected to the computers, and Lance, Keith, and Matt would have a clear path.

The mission was looking easier by the minute. Thanks to the BLIP-tech scanners in the paladins’ armor, Coran had determined that only one prisoner was being held here. It had to be Jost. There would be a little bit of fighting, but not as much as on a usual mission—especially if Pidge managed to remotely lock all the doors to keep the guards trapped.

“All clear outside,” Shay whispered. She sounded nervous—not that Hunk could blame her. This was her first time solo piloting Yellow when there was a chance of combat, but she was determined to see it through.

Still, Hunk switched over to a private frequency. “You doing okay?”

“Yes.” Shay paused, seeming to hear her own clipped tone. “Forgive me. I am… tense. But I will be fine.”

“Cloak still up?”

Shay grunted an affirmative. “No fighters in the air, either. It would seem the Galra do not realize we are here.”

“Good. Let’s hope it stays that way.”

Hunk did his best to sound positive for Shay’s sake, but he couldn’t help the knot of worry growing in his gut. If the Galra didn’t know they were here, that meant Hythan—or whatever their real name was—had been telling the truth. Which meant Shiro really was being tracked. Which meant Shiro and Allura were probably going to run into trouble all alone out there in the middle of nowhere where the other paladins couldn’t get to them.

Yellow rumbled in his mind, a silent reassurance he’d grown to know extremely well over the weeks he’d been out here fighting a war. Weeks during which his anxiety had been a near-constant companion, slithering into his dreams and making him tense up at the smallest things.

He was pretty sure Yellow was the only thing keeping him from breaking down completely. Yellow, and the promise of relief kept in a little pill bottle in his pocket. He only had one Ativan left—but he _still had_ one Ativan left. He dared not take it for anything less than a dire emergency, but the knowledge that it was there, a safety net ready to catch him, gave him some measure of strength.

He breathed, and realized a moment later that the impulse had come from Shiro. Hunk flushed. He hadn’t thought about what it would mean for the black paladins to be able to slip inside their minds like this. The thought that they might see Hunk’s weakness made him want to curl up in Yellow’s cockpit and forget the rest of the universe existed.

For just a moment, Allura’s presence seemed to fade from his mind. Shiro’s remained, warm and comforting, like a long-distance hug.

 _I understand_ , Shiro seemed to be saying. _I know._

Hunk closed his eyes, just for a moment, and focused on breathing. “Thanks, Shiro,” he whispered, and Shiro nudged him, an invisible pat on the back that got him moving again.

With Pidge watching the cameras and the other three keeping Hunk, Shay, and Coran apprised of their progress, Hunk was spared having to speak for the next ten minutes. He made his way deeper into the ship, Coran occasionally guiding him with the help of the BLIP-tech sensors in their suits.

“Sentry up ahead, Yellow,” Coran said. “Wait there just a tick.”

Hunk did as he was told, listening as Keith and Matt silently took out a patrol of their own. Lance complained about not being allowed to shoot them—something Hunk guessed was one part guilt over being deadweight, one part embarrassment that he had more trouble killing enemies than most of the team, and zero parts disappointment.

“If you’re so bored, why don’t you figure out how to change that gun of yours into a sword?” Keith asked dryly.

The sentry marched past Hunk’s hiding spot, and Hunk waited another moment before stepping out and scurrying the last, short distance to the air ducts where Keith expected some kind of soporific gas called zev to be stored in canisters. Cannisters that would burst if any secure door was opened outside certain parameters.

“Pssh. Why would I want a _sword_?” Lance asked. “I’ve got this awesome rifle.”

“If you don’t think you can manage," said Keith, his voice a challenge, "just say so.”

“I can manage! Watch!”

Silence followed, during which Hunk imagined Lance was trying to summon his bayard in another form. Not the easiest thing to do, as Hunk knew. Allura had demonstrated for them all, using the red bayard; she seemed to be able to get a bayard to take on any form she wanted, but so far Matt and Hunk were the only ones who’d made the magic work. Even for them, it was sporadic. Matt’s bayard had only two forms, pistol and sword, and though he was getting better at summoning the one he wanted, he still occasionally slipped.

Hunk had managed to make his bayard become a variety of tools, including a small, laser-edge knife, but not consistently, and so far nothing battle-ready except his hand cannon.

Still, Lance tried, and grunted his frustration with each attempt.

“Okay, okay,” Matt said at last. “Don’t hurt yourself. Hunk, we’re almost to the cells. How’s it coming?”

Hunk ran his hand along the air ducts overhead, noting two canisters attached to the underbelly. He sealed his mask, then made his bayard into a screwdriver with the five-pointed head Galra screws took and carefully removed the canisters.

“I’ve got the first two. Give me a sec to look around for another backup.”

He found it with only a little searching—around the corner, out of sight from the first two, and tucked higher, near the ceiling.

“Got it.”

He wondered, briefly, whether there were more, but the cloaking device on the Yellow Lion wouldn’t hold out forever. The paladins had their helmets to keep out the gas, so if worse came to worst they could always just grab Jost and run.

They wanted to avoid that, of course. Lugging a prisoner was tough business, and Allura had wanted them to talk to Jost, make sure everything was on the level, before they brought him aboard the castle-ship.

With the security systems taken care of, Hunk found a dark corner to hide in, then waited, listening to the others. He wanted to be close in case they needed backup, but he had to be ready to run for the lion, too.

“All right,” Matt said. “Everyone ready? Going in.”

A faint beep sounded, then several seconds of silence. Hunk could hear Pidge’s fingers tapping away at their keyboard.

Someone gasped. Matt, maybe. Hunk tensed, and Pidge stopped typing.

“Shit,” Lance breathed.

* * *

Shiro tensed along with the three paladins in the prison block. The distance between them was so great that Shiro and Allura could only glean vague impressions of the mission on the _Seeker—_ emotions, fuzzy images, an occasional snatch of conversation. Enough to know that things had so far been proceeding apace and that the mission had not been a trap.

So Shiro couldn’t see everything Matt was seeing now, only a few details. Blood. Darkness.

He felt the horror, though, and that by itself was almost enough to make him turn around and take Black back to the rest of his team.

_Not yet._

The words came from Allura, but Shiro’s mind was already supplying the rest of the argument. Something terrible had happened on the Galra prison ship, but the paladins were not in danger, not directly. They were fine. As fine as anyone could be in the middle of a war.

Shiro and Allura, on the other hand, still had a job to do. The planets of system W-91 were uninhabited except for the overseers at the mines on the second planet and the logging operation on the third. The work here was all carried out by sentries, most likely because of local predators, according to Allura. System W-91 was home to vicious beasts of all sorts, small and large. There were too many to eradicate the population, too many for the workers to go unarmed. At the same time, the production was too high for sustained isolation like there was on a planet like Revinor.

All in all, it was the perfect place for a feint. It was important to Zarkon—the ore was used in the circuitry that controlled sentries, and the lumber could be processed into a kind of resin used throughout the empire. So the Galra would well believe that Voltron might hit this system in an attempt to strike an economic blow to their enemies.

At the same time, however, there was no guilt about pulling out, should Hythan’s warning prove true.

Though in all honesty, Shiro was starting to think they’d been lied to—or Hythan had. They’d been here twenty minutes, and there was no sign of the Galra fleet.

“We should move in,” Allura said. It was not strictly necessary for them to speak aloud; Shiro had understood Allura’s thoughts before she spoke. But speaking was comfortable, and the silence out here, without the chatter of the other paladins to break it, was stifling.

“You think they’re waiting for us to make the first move?” Shiro asked.

Allura, he knew, thought nothing of the sort. She was just tired of sitting here doing nothing, as was Shiro. Faint embarrassment filled her, and she said, “You never know.”

Well, it _was_ better than nothing. Shiro readjusted his grip on the controls and considered the best approach. Out in the open? Or a more stealthy tack?

Before he could decide, Black’s scanners picked up a wormhole in the vicinity, and Shiro’s heartbeat faltered. The Galra. He didn’t need to wait for them to come through to know. His prosthetic felt heavier than it had since he was first attached, and hot in a way it only ever did when it was active, and Shiro ignored the sensation that someone else was tightening his grip on the controls.

A silent nudge from Allura’s mind brought his thoughts back to the problem at hand, and he engaged the cloaking device Pidge had recently installed on the Black Lion. For a while only the Yellow and Green Lions had had the ability to cloak themselves, but it was so useful Matt had bugged Pidge until they helped him install it on Red. After that, Blue and Black had followed close behind.

The cloak shimmered now as it settled into place, and Shiro held his breath as the Galra fleet arrived. And it _was_ a fleet: a warship flanked by half a dozen gunners. The wormhole hadn’t even closed when fighters began to pour out of the warship.

What thin hope Shiro had been clinging to that the fleet’s arrival was a coincidence melted away as the fighters zeroed in on the cloaked lion. Shiro peeled away, not firing—not yet—and the fighters followed.

They knew where he was.

The knowledge sat like a lump in his gut, but he let it sink beneath his consciousness for now. They’d confirmed what they needed to confirm. Now it was time to pull out.

He let the cloak fall away as he turned and poured all his power into the engines, easily outstripping the Galra forces. Behind him, Allura’s thoughts were focused on the rendezvous point they’d chosen—the remains of a destroyed planet where a lion could hide or run until the castle-ship arrived with the other paladins.

A wormhole blossomed before them, and Shiro dove in without a second thought.

* * *

“Coran?” Matt said in a low voice, feeling numb. “You were wrong. This prison wasn’t built to hold a single prisoner.”

“What? Impossible! I’m looking at the BLIP-tech readout right now, and there’s only one set of vitals.”

Matt closed his eyes, fighting down a wave of nausea. “Yeah. That’s because the others are already dead.”

At his shoulder, Keith had gone rigid, his eyes wide and locked on the body inside the cell. The prisoner lay where they had fallen, fresh blood pooling around them. It was the same in every cell. “This was recent,” he said. “They knew we were coming.”

“If that’s true, then you five need to get out of there, now.” Coran’s voice was tight with worry and Shay, a moment later, was even worse.

“I will come get you.”

“No.” Lance had retreated, unable to look at the carnage, and stood now by the far door, his face a rigor of disgust. “Jost is still alive, right?” he asked. “Or, _someone_ is, anyway. We have to get to them.”

There was a moment of silence as everyone seemed split on whether to agree with Lance or Coran.

It was Pidge who found their voice first. “I’m not done in the records. You guys can pull out if you want to, but I’m staying.”

“Pidge...” Matt said. They grunted, and neither of them bothered to rehash the argument they’d had as they set out for this mission.

_It’s a prison ship, Matt. If anyone’s going to have records about Dad, it’s them!_

_We need to stay focused,_ Matt had said, but of course Pidge wasn’t having any of that. He knew that was what they were up to, up there in the control room. Copying records. Hacking through as many firewalls as they could before they ran out of time.

Matt wanted them to find something, of course he did, but something about this whole mission seemed...off, somehow. The dead prisoners weren’t helping any.

But he sighed and squared his shoulders. Shiro and Allura had left him in charge—again—and even if Matt privately thought he was one of the worst choices for substitute leader, he was going to see it through as best he could.

“All right, fine. Pidge, five minutes and then you pull out—no arguments. Hunk, meet us by the room that’s showing the prisoner’s vital signature. We’re going to bust them out and get back to Shay as quick as possible. Everyone keep your eyes open. They might have set up more tricks.”

It felt like a feeble plan, but the others all grunted their agreement, and Lance and Keith set off behind Matt. Hunk joined them in the corridor beyond these cells, just a short distance from the room where, hopefully, they would find Jost.

“Coran, Pidge, what’s it look like?”

“No guards in the hallway,” Pidge said. “I can’t get access to the camera inside, though.”

“BLIP-tech only shows the one signature. I think…" Coran hesitated. "I think he’s in there all alone.”

That wasn’t exactly reassuring, but they’d come too far to back out now. Gripping his bayard tightly, Matt nodded, and Keith palmed the door controls.

The room beyond was dim, lit only by a single crystal embedded in the ceiling of the chamber. Unlike the other crystals on the ship, this one glowed a harsh white and cast stark shadows beneath the metal racks and the towering chair they surrounded.

A bloodied Galra sat slumped on the chair, breath coming ragged.

Lance crossed to him at once, while Matt and Keith were still scanning the room for threats. Hunk hesitated only a moment before joining Lance—though Hunk, at least, kept his bayard up.

“Jost?” Lance asked. “Is that your name? Jost?”

The Galra moaned faintly, then opened his eyes. “You're… Paladins...?”

Lance tugged off his helmet and knelt beside the chair. “That’s us. Don’t worry, we’re getting you out of here.” He began to pry at the metal cuffs securing Jost’s wrists, but the man touched his fingertips to Lance’s arm.

“It’s too late for me,” he said.

“No, it’s not,” Lance said. “We’ve got healing pods on our ship. Whatever they did to you, you’re going to be fine.”

A ghost of a smile crossed his face. “They have drained me of Quintessence, young one. I am dying.”

Coran breathed a strangled gasp. “What? That’s not--” He paused, then muttered a curse. “He’s right. His Quintessential marker is dangerously low, and dropping fast. He won’t make it off the ship, let alone to our cryo--”

“Oh no.” Shay’s cry was soft, surprised, and Matt tensed.

“What is it?” Matt demanded.

“Ships,” Shay said. “A great many ships have just taken off from the _Seeker_. They… they appear to be _leaving_.”

“Well that’s not good,” Coran muttered. “Let me just… Quiznak."

Matt squeezed his eyes shut, anxiety tying his insides into knots. "I swear to God, Coran, if this is more bad news..."

"All the guards are gone." Coran managed to sound apologetic, not that it made his words any less grim. "It’s just sentries on the ship with you now.”

“ _Vrekt_. Guys, we need to get out of here, _now_.” Keith grabbed Lance’s arm and pulled him back.

Lance scowled at him. “We can’t just _leave_ him!” he cried, gesturing desperately toward Jost.

Keith grabbed his flailing arm and forced it down. “If the Galra have abandoned this ship, it’s probably because they mean to blow it up.”

“You… You’re Keena’s son.”

At Jost’s words, Keith went eerily still. Very slowly, his eyes shifted to the dying prisoner. “You knew my mother?”

“ _Shit,_ ” Pidge breathed. There was a rustling, then the faint beat of running footsteps. “ _Shit!_ Guys, Keith is right. I’m sorry—I should have seen it—I wasn’t paying attention—I—The engines just went critical. Deliberate overload—I can’t stop it from the control booth. We’ve got maybe two minutes before this place is space dust.”

Matt’s blood ran cold. “Shay!”

“On my way.”

“Right. Let’s go.” Matt pulled Hunk toward the door, and Lance followed with dragging steps. Keith lingered, though, his eyes riveted on Jost.

“Is it true?” Keith asked. “My knife—my mother’s knife. Allura said it was a sign of rebellion. Was she—was my mother part of your group, the Accords? Please--”

Jost shook his head. His eyes were drooping now, and it seemed a tremendous effort to meet Keith’s eyes. “Yes.”

Keith’s breath faltered. “Is that how she died, then? Spying? Working for your bosses?”

“Keith, we have to go,” Matt said urgently. Lance and Hunk were gone by now, and he could hear Pidge over the comms, breathing hard as they sprinted for Shay’s extraction point. The sound of tearing metal drowned out conversation for a moment, and Shay called for them to hurry.

Keith shook Matt off. “Please, Jost, I need to know.”

“Go to New Altea,” he said, his voice almost too low to hear. “They will answer your questions.”

* * *

Matt and Keith were the last to return to the Yellow Lion, a fact Keith would have felt more guilty about if not for Jost’s words rattling around in his head.

_Go to New Altea._

His head felt thick with questions and new knowledge, and he barely reacted when the _Seeker_ exploded, the force of the blast rattling the Yellow Lion for a moment until the artificial atmosphere collapsed, smothering the explosion and the aftershocks in a sudden, all-consuming silence.

His mother had been a member of the Accords, which was sounding more and more like an alliance between Galra and Alteans. _Alteans_. Keith knew they still existed, of course, but he hadn’t imagined they were organized enough to form a resistance, or that they would work with Galra.

Then again, wasn’t that exactly what Voltron was doing? Allura and Coran, working with Keith, helping the Galra who had been held prisoner on Revinor?

No one spoke as Shay took them back to the castle. They landed in Yellow’s hangar, and by the time they’d all made it up to the bridge, Coran had jumped them to the rendezvous point where Shiro and Allura were waiting.

“Hythan was telling the truth,” Shiro said as he entered the bridge. “They’re tracking me. A fleet showed up just a few minutes after we got there, and they found us even with the cloaking device.”

Pidge made a disgruntled noise at that, probably taking personal offense to an oversight in their stealth technology.

Shiro ignored them. He was too busy staring at his fist, his brow furrowed. “The only thing I can’t figure out is why they haven’t been hounding us nonstop since I got here.”

“They’re stretched thin,” Keith said, distracted. He hadn’t really been paying attention, but the curious stares that met his statement dragged his mind away from his own questions. “The army,” he clarified. “Zarkon can barely hold onto the territory he already controls, and it’s not getting easier with us picking off his forces. Unless he gets desperate enough to pull all his forces away from their deployments to try to overwhelm us, he can’t justify sending a never-ending stream of ships after us.”

Allura rubbed her forehead, but nodded. “He’s only using it to send reinforcements after we've already made our move. For now, anyway. No wonder we’ve been running into so many robeasts.”

“Hold on, hold on.” Lance flailed his hands, his lips pursed. “If they’re tracking _you_ , then how come they knew _we_ were coming to the prison ship?”

“Maybe they didn’t,” Shiro said.

Matt leaned back against Coran’s control board, drumming his fingers against the metal. “I don’t know, Shiro. They’d only just killed their prisoners, and they were ready to blow the ship and run. Why would they do that if they didn’t know we were on our way?”

“It does seem like an awfully big coincidence,” Shay said.

Crossing his arms, Lance glared at the viewscreen. It showed only stars now, but Keith suspected Lance was thinking of the message that had been displayed there not two hours before. “Maybe this Hythan person _did_ betray us. Fed us just enough of the truth to get us to trust them, then tried to catch us in two traps at once.”

“Hythan couldn’t have known where Shiro and Allura would be,” Keith said. “That much _had_ to be the tracking device.” He saw Shiro flinch and almost—almost—took back his words. But he was right, he knew he was. Shiro _was_ being tracked, and ignoring that fact wasn’t going to help anyone. “The Accords aren’t our enemies. For all you know, the _Seeker_ intercepted the same message. That could explain why they decided to cut their losses.”

“You’re just saying that because Jost knew your mom.”

Lance’s words were sharp, meant to cut, and they did. Keith opened his mouth to retort, then faltered. He couldn’t stop his ears from folding back against his skull.

Shiro was frowning now, thoughtfully. “He knew your mom?”

Keith nodded reluctantly. “I think she was a member of the Accords.” Quietly he drew his knife and stared at the symbol etched into the blade. _Loyalty._ When he lifted his gaze, Allura was watching him. “And that’s not all he said. He said if I wanted to know how she died I should go to New Altea.”

Coran gasped softly. “ _New_ Altea?”

“That’s what he said.” Matt shrugged, glancing at Keith. “We’ve already heard about the Altean resistance from Anamuri and the rest of the Kera rebellion. And we know from Keith and Shiro that some Alteans _did_ survive the destruction of your planet. Is it really that much of a stretch to think they’d rebuilt somewhere in the last ten thousand years?”

“Perhaps not,” said Allura. She looked a little dazed, and her eyes lingered mostly on Coran. “But I never thought...”

“They’re allies,” Keith insisted. “Jost, Hythan, the Accords. Vrekt, we don’t actually _know_ that Jost was a Galra. He could have been an Altean in disguise. Either way, Hythan was telling the truth.”

Shiro lifted his prosthetic arm and flexed his fingers. “So I _am_ being tracked. I’m putting you all in danger.”

Scowling, Matt pushed off Coran’s control board and went to flick Shiro’s ear. “Stop that. We’re not in any more danger now that we know than we have been for the last couple weeks. The only difference is that now we know what we have to do to fix it.”

“Which we were already doing,” Pidge pointed out. “We’ve already got the scans of Shiro’s arm, and I’ve been digging through the code. It’s not that much harder to keep an eye out for some tracking software, too.”

“Or a nav chip,” Hunk added. He clapped Shiro on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll figure this out.”

Shiro smiled around at the group, and only Keith seemed to notice how tired he was. “I hope you do,” he said.


	11. Heritage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Voltron received word from Dez (going by the name Hythan of the Accords) that one of her operatives was being held in a high security prison. She also warned them about what Thace had discovered--Haggar is tracking Shiro. The team split up, Shiro and Allura confirming the existence of a tracking device, the other paladins attacking the prison ship to rescue Jost. The Galra tracked down Shiro and Allura, who were able to escape unharmed, but they also knew about the attack on the prison ship and rigged it to blow while the paladins were still on board. They were forced to leave Jost behind, but not before he told Keith to seek a place called New Altea to learn how his mother died.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for dysphoria in this chapter. To avoid it, skip the paragraph near the end of the chapter that starts, "Naomi kept sneaking glances at him."

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1604  
>  Day of Voltron’s return**
> 
> Transport crew reports loss of contact with subject 5Nn [Pidge’s note: Matt] early this morning. Commander Sendak has taken charge of the recovery efforts.
> 
> Final preparations on Vel-17 continue apace. The Ziva have proved useless for Project Robeast’s research and will be returning here for quarantine.

* * *

Nyma stared at the _Harbinger’s_ control panel, frozen, as the distress beacon continued to blare. It had been doing that for about a minute now, and Nyma so far hadn’t worked up the mental coordination needed to address it. Fortunately (or not so fortunately) Beezer had automatically decrypted the beacon and displayed the relevant information on-screen for Nyma, who was manning the bridge while Rolo slept in the crew quarters.

_Ambush. Galra lying in wait. Merchant vessel, class 2KT._

It was this last part that caught her eye. Class 2KT vessels existed in all the official registries except the Empire’s, but no one who didn’t know exactly what they were doing could get that particular certification. The KT line was for smugglers and bounty hunters, a certification that gained them entry to certain black market spaceports and warned rival hunters off. Most people only reported that far, because the two…

The two meant they were also rebels. Renegades. Resistance fighters, some would say, though that implied a level of organization that just didn’t exist in the underworld of the Galra Empire. 2KT ships usually worked alone, or coordinated with a small handful of known allies. They didn’t reach out to the larger rebellions, whose tactics hunters tended to find grandiose and more than a tad suicidal—but in reality 2KTs died at least as often as any other rebel. More often, maybe, unless the label was mere window dressing.

When you fought the Galra empire, you died. Didn’t matter if you considered your tactics suicidal, didn’t matter if you worked alone or with friends. Zarkon had no mercy for those who took a stand. The only real choice was to give up, ditch the _two_ and go back to regular old smuggling.

Nyma would know. The _Harbinger_ herself had been a 2KT, back when Nyma and Rolo had had an actual crew.

That crew was all dead now, and Nyma was once more a boring old KT pilot, scraping by with scavenged scraps and whatever bounties they could find. They’d collected from the Galra Empire exactly once, and then only reluctantly, but by and large they steered clear of the Galra. _Harbinger’s_ history spoke for itself, and Nyma wasn’t going to risk a one-way ticket to the Arena for anything short of the apocalypse.

With numb fingers, Nyma reached out and silenced the distress beacon. From the number of Galra ships the 2KT had reported (more than the _Harbinger_ could fight off, that was for certain) and the time since it had begun transmitting (long enough by far for the Galra to finish their work) there was nothing more to be done.

But the blaring alarm had roused Rolo, who stumbled into the cockpit, rubbing his eyes. “We dying?” he asked.

Nyma snorted. “If we were, I doubt you’d have time to ask.”

“You think you’re so witty...” Rolo dropped heavily into the pilot’s seat, nudging Beezer aside with his foot. “Take a rest, bud,” he said. “Your power supply’s gotta be running low.”

Beezer whirred unhappily, but backed into his power station along the wall. He _had_ been pushing himself lately, serving as copilot for whoever else was on duty and occasionally manning the weapons. They’d had a rough run of it lately, and the simple fact was cyber-units could push themselves harder and longer than organic beings. But they couldn’t keep running indefinitely, especially not Beezer, who was running now on more scavenged pieces than original. If it was possible for a cyber-unit to age, Beezer was an old man, still going only by pure stubbornness.

By the time Beezer powered down for a rest cycle, Rolo had already dismissed the distress beacon. “We wait for Beezer’s cycle to finish, and then we check it out,” he said.

Nyma closed her eyes. “Are you _sure_ that’s smart? What if the Empire’s still hanging around?”

“Hanging around a rogue bounty hunter’s ship?” He scoffed. “They’ve got better ways to waste their time. Besides… Think of the salvage.”

Despite the situation, Nyma found herself smiling. Salvage. Right. Rolo was lucky they were smugglers—no one else would have such a ready-made excuse. “That bleeding heart of yours is gonna get us both killed one of these days.”

“ _My_ bleeding heart?” Rolo gave her a pointed look, and he didn’t even need to say what he was thinking. Nyma’s face flushed as she remembered her ill-advised attempt to steal a Voltron Lion.

“I know,” she snapped. “I _know_ , okay! It was a stupid plan, and we’re lucky it only set us back a couple weeks. But if it _had_ worked--”

“If it had worked, we’d still probably be dead now.” Rolo leaned back in his chair, pulling his tinted goggles down over his eyes. “Leave the heroics to the stupidly brave.”

“Says the man chasing an Empire fleet into a known ambush to look for survivors.”

“ _Salvage_.”

Nyma rolled her eyes. “Sorry. Salvage.” She frowned at the stars visible through the viewscreen. They normally stayed far away from inhabited systems—easier to hide that way, and less risk of getting someone shot—and today was no exception. The distress beacon echoed in her ears, and she wished her first instinct wasn’t to lament the fact that the _Harbinger_ didn’t have the firepower to make a difference in any battle.

_Your rebel days are over, Nyma. Get a grip._

“You know there won’t be any, right?”

Rolo lifted one lens to squint at her. “Any what?”

“Survivors,” Nyma said. “The Empire never leaves any. You can’t actually be hoping this time will be different.”

Rolo shrugged irritably and reclined his seat. “Your friggin’ distress beacon woke me up halfway through my sleep cycle, so if you don’t mind, I’m gonna catch a nap. Wake me up when Beezer’s ready.”

* * *

“What are the odds the Galra are still there?” Shiro asked, staring at the holo-projector, where Coran had displayed the source of the new distress beacon.

Lance stood next to Coran, the others ranged around the display, all of them studying the map of System B-91. Not that there was much to see. A small freighter, flashing red, hovered in the middle of a cluster of other ships. This fleet was gray and fuzzy, the computer’s best estimate based on the data contained in the distress beacon.

Lance found himself assessing the situation like it was a game of eshet, estimating the various ships’ stats and trying to figure out the best tactical entry point for reinforcements.

Flushing, he told that corner of his mind to be quiet. Sure, he and Coran had been playing every chance they got for the last six days, but six days didn’t make anyone a tactical genius, or even a tactical Average Joe. This was real life, not a game. Just because Lance’s brain had decided to interpret everything as part of his competitive space D&D campaign didn’t mean he actually knew what he was doing.

Allura’s face was tight. “Difficult to say. This is the first time we’ve caught a deep-space distress beacon so soon after it was triggered. I couldn’t say how long the Galra will stick around.”

Shiro nodded. “Then we go in expecting a fight. Hunk, Shay, you head straight for that freighter. If you find any survivors, get them into Yellow so Shay can start treating them. Head back here if you need to. The rest of us will cover you.”

Shay nodded even more vigorously than Hunk, and Shiro turned his gaze to the other paladins. “Everyone ready? Then let’s head out.”

They split up and headed for their lions, and Coran took his place at the controls Allura normally manned. It had taken a concerted effort to modify the castle-ship’s security protocols, but a combination of Allura’s credentials and Pidge’s trickery had allowed them to add Coran to the list of authorized users, so he could open wormholes and all the rest now, which meant no more of the Allura-storing-one-emergency-wormhole nonsense that had let them scrape by so far.

There were even a few new faces on the bridge this time around—a pair of Galra from Revinor who had approached Allura with a plea to let them help.

“We believe in peace,” Zelka, an older woman who had adopted all the children as her official-unofficial grandkids, had said. “And we are willing to fight for it.”

Her companion, a young man named Tev, had nodded. “It was never the fighting we objected to, only the goal.”

Very little discussion was needed to agree to their offer. The paladins needed all the help they could get, and Coran had whispered something about the Voltron Guard, the old auxiliary forces he sometimes told Lance about.

Tev and Zelka were not that, but they were a start, and they gave Coran more freedom in battle. He took the helm, Tev manned the lasers, and Zelka, who had been a mechanic up until she’d sabotaged the defense grid she’d been sent to fix, leading to a small-scale prison break, monitored the castle’s schematics. Neither of them were familiar with Altean systems, but they learned quickly and worked hard, and even half a week had brought them to a point where they could hold their own in combat.

There had, of course, been concerns of spies—things Allura mentioned mostly because she believed in being thorough. None of them honestly suspected Tev or Zelka, or indeed any of the two dozen Galra now living in the castle. They had as much reason to hate Zarkon as anyone, and far less reason to betray Voltron.

The only one who seemed uncomfortable with the arrangement was Keith, and that was just because the other Galra regarded him as some kind of folk hero, whispering together whenever he walked into a room, saluting whenever he spoke to them and answering questions with a crisp, _sir!_

Lance had to admit it was amusing to watch Keith squirm.

The amusement didn’t last long today. As soon as the elevator doors closed behind Lance, the looming possibility of battle settled over him. Zarkon seemed to be getting more vicious lately. Maybe that was just Team Voltron growing more aware of his actions, or maybe it was petty retaliation for the handful of victories the paladins had managed to win in the last—how long had it been? It was hard to keep track out here in space, but Lance thought they were getting close to two months.

Two months seemed like an eternity, until Lance thought of how far they’d come. Two months ago, they’d been a bunch of untested cadets, hardly knowing what they were doing, fighting just to stay alive. Now, though, it almost seemed like they stood a chance of giving Zarkon an honest challenge.

Oh, not yet, not by a longshot. But if they could gather the scattered resistance movements that had sprung up around the empire, if they could make a few strategic strikes to hurt Zarkon’s supply chain…

Once Lance reached Blue they headed out, leaving the hangar just as the castle emerged from the wormhole. It was hard to think of the future with the decimated freighter drifting just ahead of him. There was a hole through the center of it nearly big enough for Blue to stick her head inside, and bits of ship spattered the empty space around it like a localized dust storm.

Lance was afraid to even look at the BLIP-tech display. The ship’s shields had been smashed, and even ignoring the one massive wound, it looked like the hull had been breached in several other places. The crew was surely all dead by now.

Looking for survivors was Hunk’s job, anyway. Lance turned with the rest of the team to scan the system, expecting an attack at any minute. Blue’s cockpit remained dim and quiet, most of the sensor readouts coming to him now through Blue herself. Lance wasn’t sure when exactly it had happened—probably in increments over the last few weeks as he learned how to communicate with his lion—but the explosion of indicator lights and caterwauling alerts and jittery readouts and click-whir-chirp-flash assault on the senses had quieted itself to a rumble in his chest and a viewscreen interrupted by only the most critical displays.

It was surprisingly peaceful out here, and with Blue’s voice in his head guiding his easily-scattered thoughts toward the day’s mission, Lance found it easy to leave behind his big-picture worries—at least for now.

The Red Lion ventured a little farther from the wreckage, searching around the distant planets in case a fleet was hidden behind one of them. Lance trailed after them, wary of an ambush, but nothing struck. The Galra seemed to have hit fast and bailed.

“I don’t get it,” Pidge muttered. They stayed near the Yellow Lion while Shiro and Allura joined the search for stragglers. “It’s just one merchant ship, and they didn’t even stick around to grab the cargo? What gives?”

“Don’t overthink it, Pidge,” Lance said. “Zarkon’s a douche who kills whoever’s most convenient when he happens to be in a bad mood.”

“I guess...”

Shiro hummed in a way that made it impossible to tell whether he thought there was more to this than it appeared. “Hunk, Shay, what’s the news?”

“Life signs,” Hunk said. “Definitely life signs, but...”

“They appear to be _outside_ the ship,” Shay said. “We are on our way in for a closer look.”

Shiro grunted. “All right. Be careful. Pidge, stay close.”

Pidge nodded, and the next time Lance looped around he saw them hovering above the wreckage—close enough to help the yellow paladins if something went wrong, but far enough away not to get caught in an ambush. If that’s what this was.

Lance kept patrolling in wider and wider circles, never straying far from the Red and Black Lions. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say _they_ weren’t straying far from _him_. He always seemed to be in the middle of their loose formation, as if—being the only one besides Pidge who hadn’t found his copilot yet—he was automatically more vulnerable.

Okay, so maybe, _technically_ , he was. But he’d got along just fine so far. He was still a paladin, wasn’t he?

“Uhhhh, guys?”

Lance’s irritation faded at Hunk’s voice, tentative and… confused? “What is it?” Lance demanded. “Did you find survivors?”

“Not exactly,” said Shay.

Hunk hummed unhappily. “Try scavengers.”

* * *

“I still say we should have blown them all to pieces,” Lance muttered as he joined the other paladins in the Black Lion’s hangar.

Hunk frowned at him, moving aside to make room for him in the loose circle surrounding their… guests. Rolo, Nyma, and their robot Beezer sat moping on a stack of crates in the corner of the hangar, separated from their ship by both the Black and Yellow Lions. Shiro, Keith, and Shay seemed confused at the hostility filling the air, not that Hunk could blame them. Considering everything that had happened since the last time the paladins ran into the _Harbinger_ , they’d all but forgotten about the incident.

Well, all of them but Lance had forgotten. He hadn’t stopped glaring at Nyma since he’d hopped off the elevator, and he had his bayard in hand. Not active, not yet, but the weapon certainly wasn’t lending this conversation a friendly air.

“We’re not here to steal your lion, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Nyma said dryly. She leaned back on her hands, crossed her legs at the knees, and idly kicked the air. “Believe me, if we’d known you guys would be coming, we’d be _long_ gone.”

“What?” Lance crossed his arms with a sniff. “Afraid we’d force you to be decent people for a change? Or are you just embarrassed to be caught looting dead bodies?”

“Sorry to interrupt.” Rolo glanced briefly at Nyma, who looked ready to leap to her feet and sock Lance in the jaw. The glance lasted only a moment before Rolo returned his gaze to Keith. Rolo had been staring at Keith almost since Hunk and Shay escorted them off the Yellow Lion, and Hunk wasn’t sure he liked the look in the dude’s eyes. “Have you always had a Galra on your team?”

The paladins drew in a collective breath that seemed to drain the room of warmth. Pidge went rigid, Allura scowled, and Shiro and Matt moved at the same instant to place themselves between Keith and Rolo. Hunk probably would’ve done the same if he’d been closer.

Surprisingly, though, it was Lance who spoke first, his voice icy and dangerous. “Keith’s a paladin of Voltron.” The words were practically a growl, one that seemed echoed by both the lions present in the hangar. “You got a problem with that, you might want to stop talking. _Now._ ”

Keith sighed, exasperated, and shouldered his way past Shiro and Matt. “Okay, guys? I’m touched, really, but you mind cooling it?” He held up his hands and gestured for calm, then turned to Rolo with a lopsided smile. “I’m Keith.”

“Rolo.”

They shook hands, pleasant as a pair of grandmas having tea. Hunk gaped at them, tried to speak, and found he didn’t even know what question to ask. Why was Keith being all buddy-buddy with Rolo? Why was _Rolo_ so laid back about it? T hat was _not_ the way people reacted to meeting a Galra—even if this particular Galra was one of the good guys.

Well, okay. Like half of Team Voltron had been pretty much the same, but that was different. They were paladins, and they’d seen for themselves that Keith meant well. Rolo and Nyma were… well, criminals. They hated the Galra Empire, except where there was a profit to be made. Of all the people in the universe who might accept Keith on sight, Hunk would not have pointed to these guys.

But Rolo just shoved his hands into his pockets and smiled at Keith, a little incredulous. “I’ll be damned. An honest to Teska Galra paladin. I didn’t think I’d live to see the day.”

“Honestly? Neither did I.” Keith’s lips quirked into a smile. “So how’d you manage not to end up dead?”

Rolo shrugged. “I passed better when I was a kid. Made it to my first year of training before I said ‘fuck it’ and blew a hole in a command ship on my way to freedom.”

Lance’s eyebrows puckered in confusion. “Passed? Training? What the hell are you talking about?”

On the other side of the circle, Matt looked nearly as confused, eyes darting from Keith to Rolo and back. “Do… you two know each other?”

Rolo laughed at that, and Keith just shook his head. “Of course not.”

Chuckling, Nyma kicked the air again, somehow managing to make the gesture look friendly. Or maybe that was the way she was smiling at Keith—actually smiling, with none of the bared claws she had for the rest of them. “Alright, I admit it. You guys are cooler than I thought. Almost makes me feel bad for last time.” Beezer chirped an agreement.

And suddenly, Hunk understood. “Oh,” he said. “ _Ohh_. You’re a— _Oh._ ”

“You can say the word Galra, you know.” Rolo gave him a lopsided smile. “And yes, I am. Half of one, anyway, not that the other half matters to most folks. I’d have mentioned it sooner, but...” He shrugged, his smile stretched tight. “In my experience, most hero-types shoot on reflex as soon as they hear the G-word.”

“Not us,” said Shiro, so earnestly it made Nyma giggle into her hand. “Voltron exists to defend the _whole_ universe—Galra included.”

Rolo let out a laugh, not cruel, just incredulous, like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Well whattaya know? Maybe there’s some truth in those old legends after all.”

* * *

Val slammed her heel against the cell door and screamed wordless fury.

Behind her, Luis sighed and slouched lower in the corner. “Here we go again,” he muttered. Yir, curled next to him, trilled their worry.

Val ignored them both, of course. She’d been here a month, as near as she could tell, and she was no nearer to escape than she’d been the first time she’d tricked the guards into giving her a tour of the ship. Partial tour. Whatever.

That had been more than two weeks ago, and Val had been dragged out of the cell block (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) four more times for interrogation. She’d mostly opted to remain silent during those interviews, even if doing so earned her more bruises, a broken nose, and—once, when Commander Vanda had turned the reigns over to her tactless brute of a second-in-command—a nasty burn on her arm from the edge of a glowing blade.

She was going to have an ugly scar from that one.

But Val had grit her teeth and endured. The Galra thought she had information for them; it was the only reason they kept pulling her out of her cell, when they left most of the other prisoners alone. A handful were taken away regularly, but their cells were too far from Val’s for conversation, and she couldn’t be sure what sorts of questions they were being asked. _If_ they were being asked any questions at all. She’d heard the moans of pain in the night, moans and frantic whispers and broken sobs.

She didn’t think interrogation could explain those sounds, not unless the others were being treated far worse than Val.

Not that she was being treated _well_. Every time she ignored a question, the Galra got more aggravated. If she was lucky, she was just dragged by her hair back to the cells and locked up a whopping five minutes after she’d left.

Vanda assured her answers would make the pain stop, but the simple fact was Val didn’t _have_ answers, not the sort of answers Vanda wanted. She probably wouldn’t have said anything even if she _did_ know every intimate detail about whatever cache the Alteans had left behind, or what Voltron’s plans were—but that was beside the point.

Val _needed_ these interrogation sessions. Most of them had been in the same cluster of rooms not far from the cell block, but one time Val had been marched, head down and arms cuffed behind her back, some distance across the ship to Vanda’s office. She thought it was an office. It was _new_ , and that in itself was promising.

Val hadn’t seen a hangar yet, but she was building a map of the ship all the same. She couldn’t afford to stop until she knew where she needed to go to escape.

Well, she was tired of waiting, so she’d decided to try a bluff.

Part one had gone into effect late last night, and Val was still feeling the after effects. She’d faked an emotional breakdown—Well. _Faked_ might have been a bit of a stretch. Just because she’d managed to suppress most of the tears since she’d arrived didn’t mean she didn’t lie awake at night missing her family, wondering whether she was ever going to see them again, wondering whether Lance had gone through all of this, too.

The guards had eventually come in, annoyed by her wailing, and told her to shut up. When she hadn’t quieted, they’d dragged her out of the cell, and Val had thrashed, shrieking in terror that was only _mostly_ an act.

It had felt good to give in to the fear. Scarily so. There was still a quiver in her chest when she thought of how easy it had been to collapse in on herself, letting the prison’s darkness seep into her until she saw death all around. She was afraid if she ever let herself fall into that trap again, she wouldn’t have the strength to crawl back out.

So she fought. The guards had locked her in what the prisoners called solitary, a soundproof room just outside the cell block. There were no lights in solitary, nothing but cold metal walls and a hard floor and no one to hear you scream.

Eventually the guards had returned, kicked her savagely in the ribs for the trouble, and tossed her back in here. Val had forced herself not to resist. To act like a meek and frightened captive.

She needed Vanda to believe she’d finally broken.

As soon as she heard the guards’ footsteps approaching, Val put words to her screams. “Let me out! Let me _out! Please!_ ” She was tempted to add a sob for good measure, but she’d never been good at faking it, and her all-too-real sob-fest from earlier had left her emotionally drained.

Fortunately, the guards saved her the trouble of having to decide how far to push her act. The electric baton cracked against the bars, and Val fell silent, whimpering.

“Quiet!” roared the guard with the baton.

The man behind him huffed. “It’s _that one_ again. Told you we should’ve left her in there for a day or two.”

"Please,” Val whispered, shivering at the thought of spending any more time in solitary. At least here she had Yir and Luis to keep her company. Luis was a little rough around the edges, but Yir’s fluff was soft, and they never hesitated to let Val cuddle up beside them at night. “Please, I can’t stay here. I need to get out. I want to go home.”

“And I want a vacation on Bedula,” the first guard snapped. “Stop whining before I _give_ you something to howl about.”

He turned to go, and Val lunged for the bars. “No! Please! I’ll tell you—I’ll tell you everything!” They stopped, and Val smiled inwardly. “ _Please_! The Altean cache—I know where it is. I’ll tell you, just—Just let me go!”

When the guard hit the door release, Val cringed, half expecting a blow, but the guard just grabbed her roughly by the elbow and dragged her along behind him.

“You’d better be telling the truth, human. For _your_ sake. Commander Vanda’s just about done humoring you.”

 _Good,_ Val thought as she stumbled down the corridor. _Because I’m done playing around._

* * *

“And when I went down to the moon there, I found Lance handcuffed to a tree,” Hunk said, laughing awkwardly. He shot a glance at Lance as if to say, _Is this okay?_

Lance pointedly looked away, his already sour mood turning rancid when his eyes found Nyma. She was still perched on her crate like a queen holding court, Shiro and Shay nodding along as Nyma and the paladins took turns filling the newcomers in on what had happened the last time the Castle of Lions had run afoul of the _Harbinger._

And for the record? Listening to his friend talk about Lance making an idiot of himself was not exactly family fun time.

Maybe he was being unfair. It wasn’t like Lance had never done stupid things chasing pretty girls before. Usually he tried to stay positive about it. Live and learn, carpe diem, don’t worry-be happy. That sort of thing.

It was different this time. Maybe because the incident was still so fresh in Lance’s mind. Maybe because it had ended with Blue very nearly getting stolen from him.

At the other end of the stack of crates, Keith and Rolo sat with their heads together, laughing as they dumped on the Empire they’d both grown up in. They were speaking English—or, well, what they said was being translated into English for Lance’s ears—but there were so many names of ships and officers and planets, so many laws and maneuvers and other mysteries Lance couldn’t begin to identify, that they might as well have been speaking their own language.

And, yeah. That hurt a little, too.

He didn’t know why it should. This was probably just another con Rolo and Nyma were running to get themselves out of trouble, only this time Lance was the only one _not_ falling for it. Though Rolo’s smile _was_ just a little bit too bright to be entirely fake.

When Keith stopped gossiping long enough to ask Rolo and Nyma what their story was, Lance spun on his heel and headed for the door. He didn’t need this. Let the others get all buddy-buddy with the con artists; Lance had learned that lesson already.

“Lance,” Shiro called. “Where are you going?”

“Blue needs a bath,” he said, raising a hand in a half-hearted wave. He didn’t turn to face Shiro’s disappointment. “Let me know when the lionnappers are gone.”

* * *

“The Empire’s not big on halfbreeds,” Rolo said. The way he spoke, voice light, arms draped across the crates behind him, it almost sounded like he was talking about a stranger, but Keith knew it was a mask. Half-Galra cropped up in the army every now and then—children of soldiers and the handful of merchants who worked willingly with the Empire, half-Galra children raised on Galra-majority worlds who wanted to make a name for themself.

Shay had followed Lance out of the hanger, murmuring about needing to organize the infirmary, but everyone else had settled in around Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer to hear their story. Keith couldn’t hide his curiosity. The handful of half-Galra he’d heard about had all ended up dead, some in training (the instructors were rumored to be particularly hard on anyone with “dilute blood”), others executed under suspicion of treason.

Keith had long suspected, though no one had ever dared say it outright, that merely having a non-Galra parent was a capital offense.

“So you grew up in the army?” Hunk asked. He looked the way he had when he and Keith had first met: open and guileless and ready to give anyone a chance. It was a dangerous attitude to have in Zarkon’s empire--and Keith hoped Hunk never lost that part of himself.

Rolo shrugged, watching Beezer. He and Pidge had retreated a few feet away, and Pidge was busy poking and prodding the poor little cyber-unit. Rover and Roswell hovered nearby, ignoring Beezer’s electronic calls for help.

“More or less,” Rolo said. “My mom was a soldier, and since she never bothered to marry my old man, her only options were to retire or to stick me in the nursery. And she didn’t want to retire.”

“So you were raised by sentries,” Keith said.

Rolo flashed him a smile that reminded Keith a little of Lance. “Now you know where I get my charming personality.”

Snorting, Matt leaned forward. “Okay, so how’d you go from nursery school to blowing up a command ship?”

“Joined the army as soon as they let me. Not like the nursery was such a blast. There were only a couple of us in there, and the other kids knew enough not to hang out with the halfbreed. Like I said, I passed better back then. Not so stringy, y’know, and my skin wasn’t quite so blue. But I never had the right eyes, and… well, that was enough for a lot of people. The instructors did everything they could to get me killed before I finished basic, and I realized I just didn’t care about Zarkon that much, so I skipped the end of year exams, stole the _Harbinger_ over there, and blasted my way out.”

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at his ship. Keith could see the remnants of the Galra gunship underneath all the scrap metal and faded paint, but it was a rough job.

“It looks like you’ve been through some tight spots,” Shiro said, obviously thinking along the same lines as Keith. There was hardly an original part left on the _Harbinger_ , and most of the replacements looked like they could use some work.

Rolo smiled fondly at the ship anyway. “She’s brought me through. Ain’t exactly easy living in the Empire as a runaway mongrel.”

“Lucky for you you found me.” Nyma stretched her arms too-casually, knocking her elbow against the side of Rolo’s head.

“Lucky for me, unlucky for you.”

“Eh, I was headed toward disaster anyway.”

“Disaster?” Pidge appeared suddenly over the stack of boxes, a wriggling Beezer in their arms. “That doesn’t sound great.”

Neither Rolo nor Nyma answered, though they traded somber glances. Beezer let out a mournful buzz and drooped in Pidge’s arms.

There was a story here, a bigger one than Keith had expected to find. Bigger than any of the paladins had expected, from the look of it. Keith had only been half paying attention to the story of how the two teams had first met, but there was obviously bad blood there, however much the tension had faded.

Eventually, Rolo sighed and leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “We used to be more than ordinary old bounty hunters,” he said. “Might’ve even called ourselves revolutionaries at one point.”

Nyma snorted. “We were young and stupid and full of ourselves.”

“We were idealistic. I knew what the Empire was capable of, and Nyma...” Rolo’s eyes flickered toward Nyma, whose face had gone dark. “Nyma had her own reasons to fight back. We found each other, and we started smuggling. Stealing. Little things to get back at the Empire.”

“For all the good it did,” Nyma muttered. She looked around the circle, braced as though for a fight. “Stealing and smuggling became bigger and bigger jobs. We gathered a crew, and then we started to get reckless.”

Keith frowned. “Reckless how?”

Nyma’s lips puckered. Rolo reached hand out toward her, but she swatted it away, and Rolo sighed. “We hit prison ships, even a couple prison worlds, if we thought we could take the defenses. We stole supplies and sabotaged weapons and dug up Intel to pass along to bigger rebel groups." He leaned forward and rolled up his pant leg, revealing a mechanical limb beneath. “Things got dicey, people died. Eventually we went back to bounty hunting.”

“And… how many of you did you say there were?” Allura asked. She sounded as though she didn’t really want to know the answer.

“A dozen?” Rolo shrugged. “Sometimes more, sometimes less. If it was easy to find people willing to trust a Galra, we would have joined one of the organized rebellions.” His eyes settled on Keith, and for all his skin and his bone structure reminded Keith of the Galra he’d grown up with, those eyes were another story. They looked almost like human eyes, focused and emotive. “I guess I always figured the paladins of Voltron would be the same.”

A hand came down on Keith’s shoulder. Shiro. “We don’t judge people for who their parents were,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Yeah.” Hunk jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Actually, we’ve got a couple of Galra refugees here now. We figure it’s our job to make a safe place for people who don’t have anywhere else to go.”

Rolo’s eyes went wide, and he looked to Keith. “Galra refugees?”

“From Revinor,” Keith explained, and Rolo blinked, rubbing the back of his neck.

“ _Revinor._ Damn me to Vkullor’s spines.” His expression softened. “You really are something special, you know that?”

Allura smiled. “We try.”

“You know.” Shiro paused, glancing toward the door. “You could stay, if you want. We have plenty of room.”

“Oh, I’m sure Mr. Hotshot Blue Paladin would _love_ that.” Nyma plastered a thin smile on her face. “Thanks, but we’ll pass.”

Shiro frowned. “But--”

“She’s right.” Rolo stood, stretching, and Beezer flailed his stubby little appendages to shake Pidge off. “I appreciate the offer, but it’s better for everyone if we go our separate ways. Still.” He leaned his head back, staring at a point on the ceiling. “If there’s anything we can do to help...”

He made the offer so quietly that Keith was sure he’d misinterpreted something. The others seemed similarly taken aback, though Allura recovered quickly and folded her hands in her lap. Amazing how she could make the paladin armor look like a ballgown. “Thank you, Rolo, that’s--”

“Woah, hold on, _what_?” Nyma shot to her feet, glaring at Rolo’s ear like she was contemplating giving it a good twist. “Are you _insane_? We tried fighting back once. Remember how that ended?”

“We tried fighting back alone,” Rolo said. His voice was as calm as ever, but his hand massaged his mechanical knee. “These folks have done more to drive Zarkon back than anyone has managed in generations.”

He turned then, meeting Nyma’s gaze, and something passed between them. The moment of silence stretched, and then Nyma deflated.

“Fine,” she muttered. “ _Fine._ You and that damned bleeding heart of yours--”

“Gonna get me killed one day, I know.” Rolo smiled at her, then turned back to Allura. “So what do you say?”

Allura rose, inclining her head to the trio of bounty hunters. “We would be honored to have your aid. We can always use more eyes and ears around the empire, and I know our allies are in desperate need of supplies.”

“You think they’d work with a Galra?” Rolo asked.

Allura nodded. “I’m certain of it. I can put you in touch with their commander, a woman by the name of Anamuri.”

"All right then. We’ll do whatever we can.”

* * *

Vanda dropped heavily into the seat across from Val, scowling fit to skin a cat. “This had better not be another waste of time,” she growled, and Val wasn’t sure if the implied threat was directed at Val or at the guards who had dragged her to the interrogation room. She’d been here before, probably could have traced the path from the cells with her eyes closed, but that didn’t matter now.

She shrank down, made a show of steeling herself, then blurted out, “I know where the Altean stuff is.”

Vanda froze. She wasn’t as put-together as usual, her hair in disarray, her clothes askew like she’d dressed in a hurry. That was curious. By the schedule the prisoners were kept on, it should have been midday. Were the Galra trying to confuse the prisoners’ sense of time, running the days short so it felt like they’d been here longer than they really had?

Or had Vanda been up till dawn working on something—something stressful and time-sensitive? Was she running out of time for this search of hers? Val hoped so. A looming deadline might make Vanda less likely to call Val’s bluff.

Slowly, the Galra commander turned, empty yellow eyes boring into Val. “What?”

Val licked her lips. Her heart wanted to hammer out of her chest, and she reminded herself that the fear was just an act. She was stronger than this. She had to be. “I—I found it. When I was--”

Val stopped, steeling herself for what came next. This was where the act came closest to reality, and Val suddenly found it hard to make herself speak.

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “I’ll tell you anything, just… _please_. Please, let me take my cousin and go home.”

It was the question she’d never found a way to ask— _dared_ not ask in any way that sounded like a question. Was Lance here? Did the Galra have him? She held her breath and waited for Vanda to speak. It didn’t matter whether or not she agreed to Val’s terms; Val didn’t expect the Galra to keep a bargain even if they made one. The important thing was knowing whether or not Lance was here.

“Your cousin?” Vanda blinked, and a slow grin stole across her face. “Yes, Iverson did mention that. Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you there.”

“Can’t… but I thought you were the commander! I thought you were in charge!”

“I am.” Vanda leaned forward, sliding one claw under Val’s chin to force eye contact. “But I’m afraid your cousin isn’t here.”

Val forgot how to breathe. “Where is he?” The question was too sharp, all Val’s trembling and flinching—real or fake—abandoning her.

“Dead, I hope.” Vanda flicked her wrist. “I’m not really sure. He’s Lord Zarkon’s problem now.”

 _Lord Zarkon._ Val felt like Vanda had taken a backhoe to her chest, carved her out and left her gasping for breath. Zarkon had Lance. Zarkon—the dick in charge of all the other Galra—had _Lance_. Val’s vision swam, and she clenched the edge of the table to hold herself upright.

 _I need to get out of here. I need to find him._ God, were Hunk and Pidge with him still? Were any of them still alive?

Vanda rapped her knuckles on the table, and Val dragged her head up, trying to focus, trying to remember the bluff. “Tell you what. You tell me what you know about what the Alteans left on Earth, and I’ll give you a choice: go home, or go to where your cousin is.”

Val stared up at the woman in horror. It was a trick—it had to be a trick—Val knew that, but she couldn’t stop that twisting in her gut that said she could be with Lance again if only she cooperated. Fat lot of good she’d be able to do him from inside the same cell, but at least they’d be together. Lance had always hated being alone.

Slowly, Val nodded. Whatever the offer, the plan remained the same. Feed Vanda the lie she’d prepared—the only lie she’d come up with in more than two weeks that sounded even remotely plausible—and hope the woman took the bait.

“Okay,” Val whispered. “Okay, I’ll do it.” She shuddered with a sudden chill and wrapped her arms around herself, squeezing her eyes shut. It wasn’t just her own life riding on this. Lance was counting on her. She could do this. She had to.

Leaning back in her seat, arms crossed over her chest—she wasn’t wearing her breastplate, Val realized distantly; that was why she looked so different—Vanda grunted. “Well? Go on? Where is it? What did the Alteans leave behind?”

Val paused, curling in on herself. It all came down to this: a gamble. A gamble that Val had guessed right about what the Alteans had left—or at least what the Galra _thought_ the Alteans had left. She’d turned it over in her head, the secrecy, the alliance with Iverson, the pressure on Vanda and now the looming deadline. Whatever they were hoping to find here, it was big.

Val had come up with three possibilities for why the Galra needed this Altean-whatever. What it was, specifically, didn’t matter as much as their reasons for wanting it, she figured, and where an intergalactic militant dictatorship was concerned, their reasons were probably pretty simple: this thing would help them expand their empire, it would solve some unknown problem inside the empire, or it posed a threat to the empire.

Two of those three possibilities pointed to a weapon of some kind, or some secret that might as well be a weapon. The solution to some unknown problem presented more possibilities, but Val already figured that was the least likely answer. Vanda didn’t seem to _know_ what was here, so she couldn’t be expecting it to solve too specific of a problem.

With a deep breath, Val played her hand. “It’s writings—tons and tons of writings. I-I found them when I was looking for the ship that crashed in the desert. I couldn’t read them, so I didn’t really think about—It didn’t seem important before. I thought you were looking for, like, a death ray or-or-or a superbug or something. A _thing._  But it’s all just writing. Altean writing, I’m _sure_ of it.”

Vanda held up a hand for silence, and Val waited, watching. The Galra seemed surprised by Val’s tale, but not suspicious. Val could practically see the gears turning. The Alteans had died out ten thousand years ago. What weapon could they have hidden on Earth that would have lasted this long?

But _instructions_ for a weapon—for many weapons, maybe. That was just as valuable. More, because it meant the Galra could build as many copies as they wanted.

When Vanda’s gaze refocused on Val, it was clear Val’s gamble had paid off.

“You will take me,” Vanda said sharply. “You will show me these… writings, and if they are what you say, then you may go.”

Val nodded, fighting down a smile.

It looked like she was finally going to see where they kept the spaceships on this floating heap of shit.

* * *

Shay did not go to the infirmary, as she had told the other paladins she would. Instead, she went in search of Lance and found him, some time later, in the room beneath the bridge where the memory cores slept. Allura had showed this place to all the paladins some days ago, encouraging them to seek counsel and comfort from their predecessors, and Shay had returned several times (once alone, twice with Hunk) to speak to Rukka. Rukka was a strong, kind woman, and Shay thought they might have become good friends, had their lives overlapped.

Lance sat now before the row of glass cylinders that held the memories of long dead blue paladins, but he had not yet activated the last one in the row. It belonged, Shay knew, to Allura’s mother.

“Are you well, Lance?” Shay asked, dropping into a crouch beside Lance. Seated on the narrow, cushioned bench as he was, he sat head and shoulders above her, yet he cringed away from her as though she were some hulking cavebeast come to devour him.

“Shay! I didn’t hear you come in.” He laughed feebly and returned his gaze to Lealle’s cylinder. “Rolo and Nyma gone?”

“I do not know. I left just after you did. You seemed… perturbed.”

“That’s one word for it.” Lance sighed, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his knees. “I just… they tricked me once. I mean, yeah, sure that was mostly my own fault, I was running my mouth off, but still. Nyma handcuffed me to a _tree_!”

“So I heard.” Shay blinked. “You are afraid she will do the same again?”

“Yes—no.” Lance groaned, running his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know. It’s stupid, I know. Didn’t I just go through this with Keith? I’m not _trying_ to be an ass, but I can’t help it. I _don’t_ trust them.”

“It is different with them than it was with Keith, is it not? He had not already betrayed your trust. You need not feel guilty for caution when it is warranted.”

“But… is it? The blue paladin is supposed to be all about trust and unity, but...” He reached his hand out toward the memory cylinder, resting his fingertips against the glass. Not the control panel, which would have awakened Lealle’s hologram, but the glass of the cylinder itself. The faint lights within streamed toward his touch like a ghostly hand mirroring his gesture. “I can’t stop thinking about how Allura’s mom died because she trusted Zarkon too much. I don’t want to make the same mistake. I don’t want any of you to get hurt because I trusted someone I shouldn’t have.”

“You are confused,” she said, lifting her hand and gently gripping Lance’s elbow. “I understand. It is difficult to see how one should fulfill the expectations of such an ancient lineage.” She thought of her own struggles to bear the mantle of yellow paladin. Rukka said people like them were supposed to be shields, to charge into battle ahead of their companions and so protect them from harm.

That was something Shay could not do. Not as she was now, certainly, perhaps not ever. She thought she might live up to the Yellow Lion’s expectations in acting as field medic, but even in this she had her doubts. It was not the yellow paladin’s duty to mend hurt, but to prevent it at its source.

“I keep trying to clear my head,” Lance whispered. “Like if I can just think about it—really _think_ about it—I’ll know what to do, but I don’t know how to separate the thinking from the feeling.”

“And… how _do_ you feel?”

Lance took a moment to consider, then said, “Scared. And angry. And like I’m in over my head.” He sighed again, and shook his head. “It’s not that I think Nyma’s gonna murder us in our sleep or anything. But Coran says paladins are always pulled between extremes. I’m either so worried about protecting _my_ people that I push away a potential ally, or I trust someone I shouldn’t and it backfires. Nyma _is_ that person I shouldn’t have trusted. The others were there to make sure nothing bad happened, but it was close—really close. And it was my fault.”

Shay frowned, searching her heart for the right words, but this was not something about which she could speak with authority. The question of trust had always been easy for her. Trust those who show you kindness, and fear those who do you harm.

Away from her Balmera and the Galra who had enslaved her, the lines were not so clear cut.

But there was one who knew better than Shay what it meant to trust. Before she could think twice about her actions, she leaned forward and pressed her palm to the control panel attached to Lealle’s cylinder.

Lance yelped, falling backward off the bench in his haste to get away. By the time he recovered, Lealle was there, tall and darkly beautiful, smiling down at Lance in quiet amusement.

“I’ve had people throw themselves at my feet before,” she said wryly, “but this is a new one. And you.” She turned to Shay, her eyes acquiring a far-off look. “The castle has seen you. You’re the yellow paladin, aren’t you? A second one.”

The hologram flickered, Lealle’s face going rigid, and Shay sighed. Rukka’s memory profile had done something similar the first time Hunk and Shay spoke with it. It was best, she had learned, to avoid the topic of dual paladins where these holograms were concerned.

“It is nice to meet you,” Shay said, bowing her head to Lealle. Shay was not sure how one addressed a queen, even one long dead, and she fiddled with her armor—still a heavier weight than she expected, however long she had had to adjust. “This is Lance, the new blue paladin. Have you spoken before?”

Lealle smiled, comfortably back within the confines of her memory profile. “Not yet. Allura mentioned you, though.” A smile crinkled Lealle’s eyes. “I see she didn’t need to lock you in an airlock with that other one—Keith, was it? Too bad. It really would’ve been funny.”

Lance did not seem to know what to say to that. Neither did Shay, for that matter, but she forged on all the same. “Your Majesty, please. We have come for advice.” She glanced at Lance, who remained petrified on the floor, one foot still hooked over the bench.

When Shay nudged him, he finally regained his composure and climbed back onto the bench. “Hey, uh, hi. Hello?” He sketched a belated bow, awkward considering he was still seated, and blew out a long breath.

“No need to be so stuffy,” Lealle said, barely suppressing a laugh. “I might have married a king, but I’ve never really considered myself royalty. And please.” She glanced at Shay, dark eyes shining. “Just Lealle is fine. I’m not one for titles.”

“Lealle, then.” Lance pressed his palms to his knees, spreading his fingers. “Maybe you can help. Coran says you were the blue paladin for, like, a billion years.”

“Closer to a hundred fifty, but sure.”

Lance smiled, relaxing a little. “How do you know when to trust? There are these people—bounty hunters. They tricked me once before, but now they’re here and they’re acting all buddy-buddy with Keith and everyone, and I don’t like it.”

“You mean you don’t trust them?” Lealle asked. “Or you don’t like that your friends _do_?”

Lance opened his mouth, then closed it, sulking. “I don’t know. Both?”

Lealle sighed, leaning back against her cylinder. “These people betrayed you. Sounds like you have every reason to be wary.”

Inhaling sharply, Lance looked up. It seemed he had been expecting an admonition, and was surprised to find commiseration. “But I’m the blue paladin. Doesn’t that mean I’m supposed to be real big on team spirit and trust and whatever?”

“Blue doesn’t choose people who trust blindly,” Lealle says. “Only people who trust deeply, and who remain loyal when times get hard. Besides.” Her gaze turned distant, and she looked older somehow, thought Shay could not have said whether that was the expression or a tangible change in the hologram’s appearance. “This is personal. Trust is hardest when a personal betrayal is involved.”

“You mean Zarkon.”

Lealle blinked a few times, seemingly dazed. “I don’t remember it well. It’s hard to pull memories out of corpses.” With a sad smile, she rested a hand on Lance’s head. Her skin blurred where it touched his hair, if it could be called a touch at all. “Listen to your friends. When your head and your heart disagree, the opinions of those you trust can point you in the right direction.”

Their eyes locked, and Shay sensed something pass between them, something she was not a part of. Maybe it was because they shared a bond with the same lion. Maybe just that they understood each other.

After a moment, Lance gave a thin smile and nodded. “Thanks, Lealle. That’s actually pretty good advice.”

“Well, you know.” Lealle smiled and touched her finger to his nose. “I’m more than just a pretty face.”

* * *

Akira’s phone rang at three in the morning, tearing him from his dreams.

He stared at the number—not one he had in his contacts—in groggy disgust. If this was some drunk college kid fumbling his ex’s number…

Before Akira could decide whether or not to answer, the call went to voicemail, and the little faceless _unknown caller_ icon dimmed, then vanished altogether. Akira slammed the phone face-down on his nightstand and buried his face in the pillow. It was Tuesday night—Wednesday morning, now—and Akira had class in four hours. He’d been up late turning over plans for a riot on campus (foolhardy plans, he knew, plans that were likely to get him fired and his students hurt, if not worse, which was why he was never going to put them into action) and he really couldn’t afford to sacrifice any more sleep.

A few seconds passed. The tension in Akira’s shoulders slowly uncoiled.

The phone rang again, some vaguely annoying pop song Akira had downloaded as a joke. A well-obviously-I-don’t-want-to-talk-to-someone-with- _that_ -ringtone sort of thing. Takashi had frowned and pointed out that not answering meant he had to listen to the whole damn thing.

Akira had been too stubborn to admit his brother was right, so he’d kept the ringtone. Now he was half a chorus away from throwing the phone out the window.

Propping himself up on his elbows, Akira swiped the screen to _Ignore_ , then set the ringer to silent. Should’ve done that when he went to bed anyway, but he never got phone calls, certainly not in the middle of the night. He’d done too good a job isolating himself after the Kerberos disaster, and all his old friends had fallen out of touch. None of his coworkers had his cell number, either, and Karen didn’t want to risk calling.

The thought that she might be calling from a public number niggled at him, and he glanced at his phone to see if the caller had left a voice message. Nothing.

 _Just some drunk asshole, Akira,_ he told himself. _Go to sleep._

He lay down once more, trying to pull the warm lethargy of sleep back over his mind, but his senses were wired from the rude awakening. He could hear the wind outside, tree branches scraping against his window. The sound didn’t usually bother him, not the way headlights in the nearby parking lot did, which was why he’d happily taken a room on the second floor when he moved in.

Tonight, though, sound grated on his nerves. One of his neighbors coughed, dry and scratchy. A car door slammed somewhere in the distance. In the hall, someone shuffled toward the bathroom.

Akira’s eyes snapped open. He’d forgotten for a second that he wasn’t sixteen anymore—the cadets had communal bathrooms in their dorms, but the faculty had nicer accommodations, including private toilets.

The footsteps in the hall drew nearer, then slowed just outside his door. Hushed voices reached him, too quiet to carry the words, but Akira recognized that terse whisper. It was the voice of a soldier giving orders.

His phone screen lit up as the mystery caller tried again, ringing silent blue light into the darkness. Akira’s heart pounded and he tried, for just a second, to convince himself he was overreacting. All this sneaking around for Karen, all the rumors flying around about what had really happened to the Garrison Three, what had really happened to the crew of the _Persephone—_ it was making him paranoid.

He was already on his feet, though, ghosting toward his desk and pulling his gun out of the drawer. It was already loaded—the paranoia was nothing new, and it had long since overruled the basics of firearm safety training—and Akira willed the tremor out of his hand as he switched off the safety and aimed at the door, finger hovering next to the trigger.

 _It’s nothing_ , he told himself. _It’s nothing. One of the other instructors has insomnia or something… And ran into a fellow insomniac… Right outside your door…_

Akira’s palms felt sweaty, but he didn’t dare take his hands off the gun to wipe them.

He heard the faint scratch of the handle turning, and the door eased open, faint light spilling in through the crack. Akira froze, nerves screaming at him to shoot before they saw him. He held off, the last rational corner of his brain convinced it was something innocent. Someone up late wandering into the wrong room.

He saw the outline of a gun at the same moment that the gun’s owner realized the bed was empty.

The man spun, night vision goggles glowing dimly green, and Akira pulled the trigger.

The shot rang loud in the silence of the faculty dorm, cracking against Akira’s eardrums. Even though he’d been expecting it, it still made him flinch, his sleep-sensitive hearing unable to cope with the noise.

A good thing, as it turned out. The intruder—one of them; Akira saw a second shape lurking just behind the first—returned Akira’s shot, a muffled _whump_ and a burst of pain in his shoulder. It could just as easily have been his heart, he knew, but that didn’t make it any easier to bite down on his cry of pain. Akira fired again, twice more, the shots followed by shouting from the rooms next door, and the intruders ducked behind the door.

Akira’s phone screen lit up again, that same number calling him for—what was it now? Fifth time? Sixth?

Swearing, Akira ripped his phone off its charger, brought the butt of his pistol down against the window to shatter it, and leaped out into the night.

He hit the ground hard and rolled, but his amateur attempt at parkour didn’t spare him a jolt of fire in his heel. He didn’t know if he’d broken something, or if he’d been shot again, but he didn’t stick around to find out. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he sprinted for the parking lot.

Halfway there, he realized he’d left his keys in his room. His keys, his wallet… everything but the sweats and baggy tee he used for pajamas, his gun, and his phone.

It was ringing again, and Akira answered. “I swear to god if this is a goddamn wrong number--”

“Akira? Oh, thank—Where are you? Are you okay?”

Akira paused between buildings, wondering whether it was possible to learn how to hotwire a car in the heat of the moment. “I just had a couple of soldiers try to kill me in my sleep, jumped out a window and probably broke my foot, and I’m going to die before I reach the gates, but _sure_. I’m great. Who the hell are you?”

“It’s me. Naomi.”

The woman from the staff lounge? How had she found his number? What did she know about this— _god—_ this attempt on his life? When had his life turned into a spy thriller? Akira shook his head. “If I wasn’t running for my life right now, I’d be asking a lot more questions. Just so you know.”

“I’m sure. But where _are_ you?”

“At the Garrison, I told you--”

“Where, _specifically?_ ”

Hope and disbelief battled in his chest, and he glanced around him. “Coming around between the main simulator building and Second Barracks. Why?”

Something struck the wall beside him, spraying chips of stone that stung as they cut Akira’s cheek. He stumbled, cursing the silencers on the soldiers’ guns (as if the sound of a gun firing would have given him time to dodge), and threw himself around the corner.

“Hold on,” Naomi said. “I’m close.”

Before Akira could ask what that was supposed to mean, a pair of headlights appeared between two buildings, and a jeep skittered around the corner, tires spraying dirt as it skidded to a stop. The door swung open.

“Get in!” Naomi shouted.

A bullet struck the back door, sparking, and Akira scrambled into the jeep. He’d barely shut the door when Naomi floored it, careening across Garrison grounds toward the chain link fence surrounding the complex. Headlights flashed on metal, and before Akira could warn Naomi the fence was electrified, she’d already plowed through it.

The fence rattled beneath their tires for just an instant, and then they were in open desert. Akira turned to look behind them, expecting to see jeeps and hoverbikes and everything else Iverson had access to chasing them down.

But the desert remained quiet, only the stars and the moon to witness their escape.

It was only then that Akira realized he’d just jumped into a vehicle with a complete stranger—one who had his number without him ever volunteering it, one who’d known when and where he would be attacked. She could very easily be one of _them._

“Okay.” Akira breathed in deeply, and instantly regretted it as the wound in his shoulder flared. Naomi looked over, concern on her face.

“You’re shot.”

Akira gritted his teeth. “Hadn’t noticed.” He glanced down at his throbbing foot, not that he could see anything in this darkness, the jeep rattling along across open desert. “I think my foot's broken, too.”

The pain must have been getting to him. Naomi didn’t need to know how helpless he was. Not that it made a difference. If she was armed, she could shoot him whenever she liked, and Akira would be helpless to stop her, broken bones or no.

He _really_ hoped she was on his side.

Naomi kept sneaking glances at him, and he hunched toward the window, suddenly aware that he was wearing only a gray tee shirt printed with the Garrison’s logo. He wasn’t wearing his binder—he never wore it to bed—and his chest felt exposed. He wrapped his uninjured arm self-consciously around himself and stared out into the night.

“You knew they were going to kill me.”

It wasn’t a question, and—to her credit—Naomi didn’t try to deny it. “I should have warned you earlier, but I didn’t think…” She sighed, easing up just slightly on the gas. Now instead of careening off every little rise and rivulet in the sand, they rattled along like they were riding a mechanical bull.

Neither felt particularly nice on Akira’s wounds.

“Iverson’s suspected you as Karen’s source for a while now.”

"I figured,” Akira said. “We kind of have a history.”

Naomi grunted, and Akira wondered if she already knew that story, or if discretion kept her from asking questions. “He was trying to find proof. Something he could use to kick you out without drawing more media attention to this whole mess. I didn’t expect him to try to off you like this.”

Akira turned his head, watching her profile as they headed back toward civilization. Her short, dark hair swayed with the motion of the jeep, and her mouth cut a grim line across her face. “Yeah,” Akira said. “Took me by surprise, too. How’d you find out it was happening tonight? And why were you driving across campus?”

“I overheard some of the officers talking about a midnight meeting with Iverson. I figured something like that had to be bad, so I snuck in to see what the topic of conversation was. Turns out it was you.”

With a grimace, Akira let his head loll back against the seat. Iverson knew what he’d been up to. He might not have had proof, but he _knew_. He knew Akira was working with Karen, knew Akira had been digging up information on Val—or trying to.

“We have to warn Karen and Eli.”

“We will,” Naomi assured him. “But they’ve got the world’s eyes on them already. Killing them would only make things worse for Iverson, no matter how quiet he was about it. _You’re_ the one I’m worried about.” Her eyes flicked up to the rear view mirror like she, too, was expecting followers. “Looks like it’s not the _entire_ Garrison that wants you dead, so that’s something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Think about it.” Headlights appeared up ahead, and Akira tensed until he realized it was just the highway, nearly deserted at this ungodly hour. Naomi slowed as they approached, and then they were gliding across smooth pavement. Smooth _er_ pavement. Akira breathed a small sigh of relief as the screaming in his shoulder quieted.

Naomi glanced at him again.

“Iverson planned this little assassination in the middle of the night, which means there are people in his own command he didn’t want to know about it.” Naomi shifted her grip on the wheel, steering with the heel of one hand while she counted points off on her fingers. “He only sent a couple soldiers after you—right? And they had silencers. Iverson wanted this quiet. I mean, you kinda ruined that by shooting back, so good job there. I hope you gave as good as you got, at least.”

Akira grimaced. “I’m pretty sure I came out of this one worse than the other guys.”

With a little shrug, Naomi changed lanes. Her speedometer hovered somewhere in the upper eighties, but Akira wasn’t going to complain about a little speeding now. “I guess I can let that slide just this once.” She jerked her thumb over her shoulder. “But most importantly, Iverson doesn’t have anyone coming after us. Which means he doesn’t want to have to explain why he’s sending a fleet after you, which _means_ he doesn’t have as much control of the Garrison as I thought.”

She turned toward him, grinning. “All in all, I’d call this a win.”

“I got shot,” Akira said flatly.

Naomi waved a hand. “Only a little. I’m gonna take you back to my place to patch you up, if that’s all right. Not sure I want to risk taking you to the ER.”

“Think Iverson has the nurses on his payroll?”

“Something like that.” Her grin faded. “There’s a lot going on here you don’t know about, Akira. Once you’ve rested, we’ll get in touch with your friends, and then…” She blew out a long breath. “Then we’re gonna have a talk.”


	12. Project Robeast

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last Time... Team Voltron ran into Rolo, Nyma, and Beezer at the wreckage of a rebel freighter. Keith and Rolo (who it turns out is half Galra) hit it off, and after a short conversation, the _Harbinger's_ crew volunteered to run supplies and information for Voltron and its allies. Meanwhile on Earth, Akira was attacked in the middle of the night, only to be rescued by the mysterious Naomi. And Val decided to try a bluff, telling Vanda she knew the location of an Altean cache on Earth. Vanda took the bait, but Val's not out of danger yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for dysphoria. To avoid it, skip the first two paragraphs of Akira's section.

> **CORE Research Logs  
>  Entry #1605 (Final entry)  
>  Dated two days after the return of Voltron**
> 
> There was an accident with the Ziva upon arrival. They broke free of containment and destroyed a large section of the laboratory structure. Two sentries were lost, but no personnel were within the radius of destruction at the time of incident. The Ziva have since been placed in the extended deprivation chambers.
> 
> The eleven remaining subjects from Generation Five have been transferred to Maorel for inclusion in Project Robeast. The staff here on Vel-17 will disperse to other research initiatives, primarily the newest project, christened Project Balmera. As of today, CORE is officially disbanded.

* * *

Lance sat back on his heels, studying his work with a critical eye.

“Okay, now spin?”

Azra, the youngest of the Galra refugees at just six years old, spun on her toes, her new dress flaring out around her. She giggled, smoothing the skirt, and fiddled with the hem as she risked a glance at Lance. She had short, fine fur in the palest shade of lavender he’d ever seen, and her eyes were impossibly big. She seemed to be waiting for Lance to pass judgment.

He beamed at her, clapping his hands over his heart. “Ah! You’re so pretty I think I just might faint.”

Azra’s ears pricked up, quivering in that way Lance was learning meant something like a flush of pride, and she planted her hands on her hips. “You can’t faint,” she said, pouting. “You said you’d give me a braid.”

She looked so offended that Lance would forget his promise of braids (not that Azra knew what a braid _was_ ), that he couldn’t help but laugh. “Of course, of course. How silly of me.” He stood and went to one of the benches lining the gathering hall the refugees had turned into a playroom. Sitting, he patted the space beside him, and Azra scampered over. “One braid for the pretty lady coming right up.”

She fidgeted as Lance brushed her hair, which was even softer than Lance would have expected. Like many of the refugees, Azra’s hair—the longer stuff on top of her head, which was several shades darker than the rest of her fur—had been long and matted when she’d first arrived. But a good shower and a ruthless trim by her big sister, Zuza, had worked wonders. It hadn’t even ended up as short as Azra had feared.

Still, a little bit of flair couldn’t hurt, and Lance was more than happy to provide.

Zuza, sitting on a pile of cushions across the room and reading to Maka and Bee, smiled at Lance. This interrupted the flow of her story, and Bee booed loudly, protesting that the grumpy adviser wouldn’t smile like that. “Reading,” with these kids, involved a lot more dramatic flair than usual. (Lance approved.) He and Zuza hadn’t had a lot of time to talk without kids scampering underfoot, but he already liked her. All the kids regarded her as a big sister, though Azra was always quick to point out that _she’d_ been Zuza’s sister the longest. From the very first day she arrived on Revinor, which was only about four months ago.

Zuza, like all of the Galra over the age of thirteen, was dressed in spare clothes from the castle’s stores. Pidge was still holding their measurements hostage, like they thought Lance would actually try to make them all new clothes simultaneously.

He had managed to bribe the kids’ measurements out of them, though it had cost him a promise of a knitted scarf. (“Later, Lance. If I find out you’ve started before you’re done with the clothes for the refugees, I swear I’ll replace your shampoo with food goo.”)

Lance had sworn up and down until Pidge relented, then set to work on the first of what was sure to be a mountain of new clothes. He’d started small—a jacket or a dress for each of the eight kids, simple but undeniably _theirs_. Azra was the last, and only because she’d refused to tell him what she wanted until the other seven all had their clothes.

Lance had never figured out if that was suspicion of his abilities or pure selflessness.

Either way, Lance was happy to finally give Azra her dress, and he was grinning as he sectioned out her hair. She sat with her legs tucked up under her, tracing the starry patterns on the bright pink fabric of her dress (her favorite color, according to Zuza), and only fidgeted a little as Lance worked. Her hair came only to her shoulders, so Lance had to get a little creative with the braid.

Fortunately, his sister Luz was something of a braid snob. Lance’s mom was hands-down the braid champion of the Mendoza family, but Lance could more than hold his own. From French to Dutch to fishtail, Lance could do any basic braid in his sleep.

With Azra, he opted for a pair of lace braids starting at her hairline and curving around behind her ears, joining at the back of her skull in a tiny ponytail.

When he’d finished, Lance twisted to look for the mirror he’d grabbed with his combs and hairties.

Azra’s face lit up at the sight of her new hairdo, and she shrieked in delight, charging toward her sister and interrupting the story—something Lance had only half been paying attention to. It reminded him of Earth stories, with an exiled princess being guarded by a dragon… except he was pretty sure _this_ princess was Voltron. (At least, he was pretty sure Zuza had said something about _before her spirit was split into five…_ He figured that was what you got when you searched for storybooks in the castle-ship’s archives.)

Zuza smiled and complimented the braids, then enticed Azra into sitting down to finish the story with the others.

Lance stood to leave, only to be stopped by a cry of, “Halt, villain!”

Lance turned, arching an eyebrow, and found Zuza brandishing a spork like a sword. The kids were gathered behind her, wide-eyed in anticipation, and Zuza waggled her eyebrows in a silent plea to play along.

“Villain?” Lance asked, then spread his feet in his best parody of Keith and flipped one of his combs around so the slender handle pointed back at Zuza. “And who are _you_?”

Zuza grinned, tossing her hair. “I am Princess Altea, the Ancient One! And I am here to stop you, Wicked King Zeltor!”

Lance, honestly, had no clue which story this was. He hadn’t spend much (any) time in the archives, and it wasn’t like Allura went around telling bedtime stories to the paladins. But the story of a wicked king seemed pretty straight-forward, and the kids were all very clearly interested in this new evolution of story time.

Really, what was the harm in playing along?

The harm, he soon discovered, was a bruised knee and some pulled hair when three Galra kids answered Princess Altea’s call to arms and helped her topple the Wicked King. Literally.

It was worth it.

* * *

Pidge sat back in their chair, blowing out a long sigh. It had been a full month since they’d taken these research logs from Vel-17, but now they could officially say they were done. Every last entry, all sixteen hundred of them (most, thankfully, a curt _nothing to report_ ), translated, annotated, and summarized in a couple pages of notes.

For all the good it did.

Beside them, Keith rubbed his eyes and set the tablet down. “Did they even _know_ what they were doing?” he asked. “Because it sounds like they were just growing crystals in him for the vrekking fun of it.”

“After everything else they did, I might actually buy that,” Pidge muttered, crossing their arms on the desk and dropping their head down onto them. Progress had slowed considerably since they’d reached the entries about Matt, and Pidge knew it was entirely their fault. Keith was pissy and irritable after each new translation, but he didn’t let it get inside his head. Not the way Pidge did.

They hadn’t been sleeping well. Not that their sleep schedule had been the most consistent to begin with, but there had been a definite down-swing these last two weeks. Talking with Matt had helped, but not a whole lot. Pidge still lay awake most nights, or stayed up with Green analyzing the code from Shiro’s arm until they passed out sometime near dawn.

Maybe if either of their major problems had been solvable, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But a month of translating research logs hadn’t given told them anything new about the crystals imbedded in Matt’s body except that they’d been implanted after the E-dep experiment. And Shiro’s arm remained as unintelligible as ever. The code was like nothing Pidge had ever seen, so figuring out even the simplest commands was next to impossible.

Finding the override? Yeah, maybe in a year or two, if they were lucky.

“So… now what?” Keith asked after a long moment of silence.

 _Now we throw these damn records in a black hole somewhere so no one else can use them,_ Pidge thought. Except that wouldn’t solve anything. The Galra already knew whatever it was they’d learned from CORE, and as much as Pidge wanted to set Keith’s tablet on fire, they resisted the urge.

Scrolling up through their own notes, Pidge looked for anything other threads that could be pulled to try to unravel this mess. “I don’t think we’re going to find anything else in these logs,” they said, then rolled their chair over to the terminal on the wall, where they could pull up the castle-ship’s systems. “We’re probably better off looking at one of those other labs they mentioned near the end. Or those other projects—Project Robeast and Project Balmera. Either of those sound familiar?”

“Project Robeast started out trying to give soldiers cybernetic enhancements,” Keith said, and Pidge listened as they searched the nav computers. “The recent reports were all classified, but given the sorts of cybernetically enhanced monsters we’ve been facing? I’m guessing Haggar got ambitious.”

Pidge nodded, frowning at the _No Match_ message flashing on their screen. “And Project Balmera?”

“Never heard of it.”

Grunting, Pidge tapped a button to project their holomap into the air above the desk. “Okay, so I guess we’re looking into the robeasts next,” they said. “Seeing as the researchers apparently wanted to send Matt somewhere that doesn’t exist.”

Keith frowned, and Pidge fluttered a hand at the display.

“Hovent Sector, that’s what the logs said. _Scheduled for transfer to Hovent Sector lab._ Except there _is_ no Hovent Sector. Not in our computers.”

“Could be a code,” Keith said.

Pidge groaned, then swiped the tablet screen. The notes disappeared, then reappeared on the wall behind the desk, almost lost in the tangle of photos, notes, miniature holomaps, and soundbytes Pidge and Keith had added to their board as they dug through the research. There had been times when Pidge felt as if they were on the edge of connecting the dots and making some grand discovery that would fix everything the researchers had done to Matt.

Now, though, it looked like a giant pile of nothing. Pidge tapped a button to create a new window near the notes—green for unanswered questions—and typed, _Hovent Sector lab: code name?_

“We’ll come back to that later,” they said. “I did at least manage to find the other planet, Maorel.”

“Where Project Robeast is being conducted?” Keith asked. “Sounds dangerous.”

“Oh, like you care.”

Keith smiled at that, but he didn’t argue, and Pidge leaned back in their chair.

“Look, CORE and the robeasts are connected somehow. They’ve got prisoners being shuttled from one to the other, and now _everyone_ from Vel-17 gets shipped off to Maorel?” Pidge shook their head. “There’s some connection there. I don’t know what, but somehow stuffing people in boxes and turning them into monsters are part of the same big picture.”

“And you want to know what it is.”

“Of course I do!” Pidge threw their hands in the air, feeling drained.

They didn’t know how to explain it, their visceral need to understand. It had always been a part of them, but it was stronger lately, like being denied answers on so many fronts made it that much more urgent that they learn something— _anything._ They’d even started taking Altean lessons on the training deck between bouts of translating research logs and picking apart Galra tech programming and heading down to the computer core to talk to Sa about how memory profiles worked.

“Information is _important,_ Keith,” they said. “We don’t have a lot of advantages in this war, so we need to know everything we can—especially about the robeasts. We’re facing more and more of them, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re getting more dangerous. The thing we faced on Arus was physically tough, but it was basically just a warship with legs. And now? Now we’ve got imitation Lions and a cloud of nanobots that can drill through our shields.”

“They’re stronger,” Keith admitted. “And cleverer.”

“If not for this whole dual paladin thing, I don’t know if we would’ve all survived those fights. We _have_ to find out what these things are, and how to stop them for good.” They looked up, expecting to find resistance on Keith’s face, but he only looked thoughtful.

“We should take this to Shiro and Allura.”

“Yeah?”

Keith nodded. “It _is_ dangerous, but you’re right. We need every advantage we can get.”

* * *

Akira woke shortly after noon in a strange bed, his shoulder and ankle still sharp daggers of pain. Naomi had cleaned and bandaged his gunshot wound last night, hardly batting an eyelash when he refused to remove his shirt. Bad enough he’d been forced to flee without his binder; he really didn’t want to get naked in front of a near stranger.

Naomi had frowned slightly, then nodded and cut away enough of his collar to get at the bullet hole. When she’d finished cleaning his wound and bandaging his ankle—sprained, she said, but not broken—she’d left him to rest. By the time he woke she’d deposited a change of clothes on the desk chair, including a sports bra, which was better than nothing, though it left him feeling more exposed than a real binder would have. The clothes (graphic tee, hoodie, and sweats) fit surprisingly well for something that had probably come straight out of Naomi’s closet, though they were probably looser on her. They weren’t bloody, though, which was reason enough to go through the trouble of changing.

Naomi had found crutches at some point while Akira was sleeping, and he grabbed them now, experimenting a bit near the safety of the bed to find what worked best. It hurt to put pressure on his right leg, but the hole through his left shoulder screamed enough just moving his arm around. Trying to support himself with that arm wasn’t happening.

Eventually he settled for one crutch and hobbled out of the bedroom toward the kitchen, where he smelled soup. He slowed at the sound of voices, but not for long.

“...going to be just fine, Karen, I swear,” said Naomi, then paused. “Actually, I think that’s him now.”

Karen and Eli were both in the kitchen with Naomi, Eli at the stove tasting the soup, Karen restless at the table opposite Naomi. Both spun toward the door as Akira hobbled in, and Akira went a little weak-kneed at the sight of them. Naomi may have saved his life, but he didn’t know her, didn’t know if she was working for Iverson.

It might have been silly of him, but having friends here made Naomi that much more trustworthy.

“Akira!” Karen cried, stopping just short of hugging him, like she wasn’t sure where to touch him that wouldn’t aggravate his wounds.

Eli wasn’t quite so cautious. He stepped up beside Akira on the bullet wound side and wrapped his arm carefully around Akira’s waist. Akira leaned on him, grateful for the support, and let himself be led to a nearby chair. He was hardly settled before Eli disappeared, returning with a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a glass of water.

Akira stared at the soup and laughed.

“What?” Karen asked, alarmed. She sat beside him, one hand on his arm, her face deeply lined with worry. “Are you okay? Naomi said you were shot.”

“I’m fine,” Akira said, and downed half the water in a single drink. Maybe he was just being overly sentimental after his brush with death, but the chicken noodle soup and its reminder of his childhood—miserable days spent in bed with the flu, Takashi fretting over him so much that he ended up sick a day or two later—made him want to cry.

It was nice, though. Like getting shot was no worse than a stomach bug.

The story came out slowly, told mostly by Naomi, who actually had some idea what was going on. All Akira could offer was the story of his own escape. Being woken by Naomi’s calls, hearing the special ops soldiers outside his door, trading fire with them, jumping out the window.

Fatigue had hit him hard just inside city limits, so he hadn’t had a chance to ask Naomi many questions about what she knew or why she was helping him.

Now she had three sets of eyes watching her, and she stared down into her empty coffee mug in silence for several long moments. She closed her eyes, sighed, and pushed her cup away. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell you everything, but this could get long, and Akira should keep that leg up. Living room?”

Akira moved—let himself be moved, really—without protest, though he kept his eyes on Naomi. _Everything,_ she said. Akira was skeptical. Naomi had had plenty of time to come up with a lie, if she wanted to. Akira knew there was no reason not to trust this woman, but if Iverson was willing to kill Akira in his sleep, he was certainly capable of sending a spy to gain his trust.

Apparently bullets spread paranoia like the plague.

Once they were settled, Eli and Karen flanking Akira on the couch, Naomi across from them in an armchair with her legs curled beneath her, she started talking.

“Something strange is going on with the Garrison,” Naomi said without preamble. “I’ve worked for them as a cargo pilot for the last ten years, but lately my shipments have gotten… weird.”

“Weird how?” Akira asked, frowning at her. At first glance, he’d assumed she was close to his own age, but she looked older now without makeup, her hair hanging limp around her face. She might easily have been in her early thirties, he supposed. “I haven’t noticed anything unusual.”

She arched an eyebrow. “You graduated, what? Four years ago?”

“Five,” Akira said.

Naomi gestured as if to say, _Well there you go._ “It started about five years ago, though it only got bad the last couple months. The Garrison’s moving something they don’t want anyone to know about. Top secret flights to the middle of nowhere. You ask too many questions, you get reassigned. Then my contract ends, and I find you folks out here accusing Iverson of murder.”

“It’s true,” Karen said coldly. “He might not have done it personally, but I guarantee he had a hand in it.”

“Oh, I’m not denying he had a hand in it.” Naomi leaned back, her hands held up to ward off Karen’s frosty glare. “Iverson’s a slippery old…” She pressed her lips together. “He’s a bastard, and if we assume your kid’s text was right, I’ll bet Iverson was the one holding Matt somewhere instead of telling the world he’d survived.”

Karen went rigid, her hand gripping Akira’s so hard he was afraid she was going to break his fingers. “Then you think the crew of the _Persephone_ survived?”

“I can’t say for sure, but… it wouldn’t surprise me.” Naomi’s voice was earnest, but she wouldn’t look Karen in the eyes, and that made Akira’s hackles rise. “But for what it’s worth? I’d bet my life that those three cadets _are_ still alive.”

It was Eli’s turn to stiffen, and Akira struggled not to curl his lip at Naomi. Something about this stunk. The way she was playing right to their weaknesses, winning Eli and Karen over with assurances about their family members. It _felt_ like a lie, no matter how bright and innocent Naomi’s eyes were, and it was all Akira could do not to pounce.

“What makes you say that?” he asked instead, struggling for civility. It was one thing for Iverson to try to kill him, but to torment his friends like this, to get their hopes up just to win their trust so he could—what? So he could kill them all in one blow? So he could pay them back for all the headaches they’d caused? Whatever the reason, it was something Akira couldn’t forgive. “If they aren’t dead, then where are they? Why haven’t they contacted us?”

“They can’t,” Naomi said. “They can’t reach you any more than Iverson can reach them. They found out he was hiding Matt, and he probably tried to kill them, but they got away.”

Akira frowned. “Into the desert? I wouldn’t exactly bet my life on their survival if they’ve been living in the wilderness for the last seven weeks.”

Now Naomi was definitely squirming. Karen had picked up on it, her wide eyes narrowing to slits, her shoulders hunching like a cat about to pounce. Even Eli seemed more wary than he’d been a moment earlier.

Seeing this, Naomi held up her hands. “Okay, okay, _listen_. This is going to sound crazy, but hear me out.” She paused, breathed deep. “The _Persephone_ lost contact with ground control while on Kerberos, right? So how did Matt even get back here? Not like Iverson could just send a rescue mission out there. _Persephone_ was the first ship ever built on Earth that could make that trip.”

“On _Earth?_ ”

Eli’s question punctuated a sudden silence, and Naomi curled in on herself, face flushing. “I _told_ you it was going to sound crazy,” she muttered.

Karen was on her feet in a heartbeat. “Do you seriously expect me to believe that my children were abducted by aliens, Miss—what was it? Smith?”

“No.” Naomi hesitated a moment, then lifted her chin, meeting Karen’s eyes coolly. “I don’t expect you to believe it. I have proof.” She stood, hesitating a moment like she expected Karen to physically attack her, then grabbed her laptop from the kitchen table.

She returned to the armchair and clicked around, and Akira tugged Karen back down beside him.

“She’s _insane_ ,” Karen hissed. “Do you hear this? Aliens!”

Eli leaned over, his eyes watching Naomi with interest. “You have to admit it fits.” Akira and Karen both turned to look at him, and Eli flushed. “What? It does. Not like she’s the first one to suggest it.”

Groaning, Akira rubbed his face. He was tired, sore, and wired all to hell, and now this. Aliens. He supposed he should be grateful that his suspicions could all be attributed to Naomi’s fringe theories and not any malicious intent, but even so…

Nodding to herself, Naomi turned her computer around and set it on the coffee table in front of Akira and the others. “This was uploaded the day after the supposed training accident, and it was filmed out in the desert near the Garrison.” She’d brought up a YouTube video, amateur footage that looked like it had been shot on a cell phone. It was shaky and out of focus, and Akira had no idea what he was looking at. A lot of sky, a lot of stone.

The kid behind the camera swore suddenly, and the camera whipped up. Something flashed past, big and metallic.

Then it was gone, and the teen turned his phone around to babble about UFOs and how amazing it was that he’d caught it on camera.

When the video ended, Akira looked up at Naomi, thoroughly unimpressed. “A UFO,” he said flatly. “Seriously. The kid was probably skipping class to get high and got freaked out by a Garrison test flight.”

Naomi scowled at him, yanked the computer back onto her lap, and restarted the video. She paused it several seconds in, then turned the computer again so Akira could see the image she’d frozen it on.

Okay, so it wasn’t a Garrison ship. Not one Akira knew, anyway—it was too big for that, flying too low to the ground. Maybe an experimental craft, a stealth bomber or something, but something like that wouldn’t have been painted that garish shade of blue.

Naomi leaned forward, smiling grimly. “You’re not convinced. That’s fine. I’ve got more proof.”

Karen slumped back in her seat, rubbing her eyes, and Akira nearly did the same. This was going to be a very long day.

* * *

If the last week had taught Dez anything, it was that she hated irony.

Thace was a traitor to Zarkon’s empire, yes, but not in the way Prorok thought. He’d been hacking Galra computers to find information to pass along to the Accords, yes, but not through any relay service they knew about.

Dez, a traitor herself, was trying to prove another traitor innocent of treason he, for once, had not actually committed.

And she was really vrekking tired of it.

It had been seven solar cycles since Thace’s arrest, and although she was making progress, it was slow going. Prorok insisted on near-constant updates, which meant Dez had had to improvise more than once, then deal with what she’d said under pressure.

She was a good liar (she’d better be, after twenty years as a spy), but it was exhausting.

“Commander Prorok wishes to speak with you, sir.”

Dez stiffened as her lieutenant spoke, and bit her tongue to keep from snapping at him. _It’s not his fault. It’s_ not _his fault._

(It wasn’t Thace’s fault, either, no matter how much she wanted to sock him in the jaw for putting her in this position. Someone had framed him, and Dez herself had made the choice to tie her fate to his by defending him. She could have had him executed and been done with it.)

But no, she had to go and be the noble one. Damn Keena for making her like this.

Sighing, Dez switched off her display and followed her lieutenant out into the corridor to answer Prorok’s summons. She smoothed her fur and gathered her thoughts, trying to get back into the lie she’d been building over the last few days. (Lies atop lies, and damn the universe for making her life so complicated.)

“Commander Prorok,” she said as soon as she’d reached the bridge. She bowed low and waited for him to acknowledge her. “You sent for me?”

“Yes.” Prorok glanced around, muttered a last few orders to one of his officers, then gestured for Dez to follow him to a private meeting room nearby. “What’s the word?”

 _Same as twelve hours ago,_ Keena thought bitterly, but she regulated her expression to something far more bland. “Little to report, sir, I’m afraid. I remain convinced of Lieutenant Commander Thace’s innocence in the matter.”

“And have you found the identity of the real traitor?”

Dez’s jaw tightened. “Not yet, sir.” Though, frankly, she was about two days away from naming the next person to piss her off and letting them shoulder the consequences of Prorok’s wrath. All that had held her back thus far was knowing that someone _had_ found Thace out. They may have had to forge the evidence, but it was no coincidence they’d chosen Thace as their target.

Had Jost named Thace under torture? How much else had Jost spilled?

Dez didn’t know, and that was pushing her to the edge of her composure. “I have access to Thace’s personal keys now, sir, and I’ve located the anomalies that the real traitor left behind. It shouldn’t be long now.”

Hopefully it wouldn’t be long. She didn’t have any real proof, but she’d taken the circumstantial evidence and tried to work backwards. Whoever had framed Thace was high enough in the chain of command to have heard the recordings of Jost’s interrogation or noticed when certain restricted files were accessed, or whatever else they'd done to figure him out—but they weren’t so high that they could simply take their suspicions to Commander Prorok. They knew Thace was a traitor, but they’d acted on it only indirectly.

Dez had been trying hard to find alternative explanations, but she kept coming back to one in particular: whoever had framed Thace knew he wasn’t working alone. They hadn’t tipped their hand because they were trying to catch her.

Which might mean Dez’s only option was to use herself as bait in a trap that would simultaneously satisfy Prorok’s paranoia and give her a legitimate reason to silence the framer before he could get both her _and_ Thace killed.

“Actually, sir,” Dez said, risking a glance at Prorok’s face (frustrated, confused, twitching with nerves… Good, maybe he’d be willing to bend a few rules for the sake of finding answers.) “Regardless of who it was who accessed those files, the fact remains that _someone_ did. It may help my investigation if I know what the traitor was after.”

Prorok stiffened, frowning at her. “The restricted files?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” she said. “You don’t need to release them to the entire department, but I need to look at the whole picture here.”

She held her breath, praying Prorok would give her this much. She couldn’t talk to Thace, but seeing what he’d seen might at least help her figure out how to draw out the person who’d framed him.

Finally, Prorok relented. “Fine. But remember those files are for your eyes only.”

Dez smiled to herself. “Of course, sir.” _My eyes, and those of the Accords._

* * *

A headache was building behind Hunk’s eyes that might have been frustration or anxiety or pure exhaustion. What time was it? He thought it very likely that he’d worked straight through at least one meal. Possibly straight through last night, for that matter.

“You need a break?” Matt asked from across the table. They’d set up shop in the same room on the eighth floor way back when they’d first arrived at the Castle of Lions, mostly in the interest of sharing tools. They’d kept on sharing the workspace because both found it useful to have someone nearby to bounce ideas off of—now more than ever.

“I’m fine,” said Hunk, rubbing his eyes. It was probably better that he _not_ know how long he’d been trying to figure out the tech behind Shiro’s Galra tech arm. This room consumed every waking minute not already spoken for by training, missions, and other minor necessities like food and sleep. (And in all honesty, he’d slept and eaten in here more often than not this last week.)

And still they weren’t making progress.

Matt, of course, saw straight through Hunk’s lie. He’d probably have spent just as much time in here as Hunk, except for the fact that Shiro showed up each night and refused to leave until Matt went with him. They shared a room now, which Hunk thought was adorable. Matt was happier for it, too, even if he did grumble about suddenly having a bed-time again.

The point was Matt was _sleeping_ , and Shiro was _sleeping_ , and once they were gone, Hunk took his work down to the Green Lion’s hangar or Pidge came up here. They kept each other company through the long nights, working in silence until their brains ached, then curled up in a nest of blankets for a power nap before they dove back into the fight.

When was the last time Hunk had seen his own bed?

Didn’t matter. Hunk blinked a few times to clear the weariness away, then met Matt’s eyes. “Need to stop staring at the hologram for five minutes, maybe,” he said, “but I’m not turning in just yet.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Matt yawned, stretching. “Any new insights?”

Hunk grimaced. “The Galra are really _freaking_ advanced?”

“I said _new_ insights,” Matt grumbled, but there was no venom in his words.

The words prickled anyway, mostly because they were true. The work had been slow going, even with four of them all working on it nonstop. Hunk waved a hand at the hologram, which was stripped down to the solid metal core. “I mean, I’m pretty sure this thing is at least fifty percent magic, so good luck figuring out how _that_ works. But even just looking at the mechanics of it, it’s _so far_ beyond anything I’ve ever seen?”

He reached out, swiping through components he’d picked apart in his working file and annotated with questions and observations.

“I mean, there’s the carbon-fiber skeleton, which isn’t _really_ carbon-fiber, it’s _vello_ -fiber, but whatever. It’s a bone. Cool. Except it’s got conductive properties that seem to have something to do with the weird glowy _vroom_ thing. _And_ it’s got a rod of pure quintessence at its core, which Coran said isn’t possible, but hell if I know why.

“And then there’s _these_ whackadoodle things.” He zoomed out to what would have been muscles in a human arm. In Shiro’s arm, it was instead filled with little hollow pockets and parallel sheets of _something_ and little metal balls in the palm that never seemed to do anything even when Shiro was using his arm. “There’s no pistons, and there’s not really any kind of synthetic muscle, and, god, even Coran doesn’t have a clue what this stuff is. I keep telling you, this arm shouldn’t be able to move, not with what it’s got stuffed inside it.”

Another swipe, and now it was the exoskeleton he was looking at.

“And, hey look, it’s skin. Metal skin that’s _way_ too flexible to be pure metal, whatever the scanners say. Oh, and its specific heat is, like, ridiculously low. Honestly, I’m surprised Shiro doesn’t burst into flame every time he gets dressed just from the friction. But wait! That’s not enough! There’s a billion tiny little pores that don’t seem to do anything, and the metal is weirdly insulated—but only in the arm part, the hand part is basically a five-fingered lightning rod.”

He realized he’d stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of his rant, and fell silent, bending over in a belated attempt to get oxygen into his lungs.

It was no use. He was an engineer—that was the whole reason he’d gone to the Garrison, the one thing he really wanted to do with his life, and, _god_ , he felt like a toddler whacking at a spaceship with a sledgehammer. And he knew he was missing things, he _knew_ it. This arm was so damn advanced there was no way there were only five distinct systems inside it—three if you didn’t count the bone and the skin—but Hunk couldn’t hardly tell what was self-contained and what was interconnected and what just happened to be _touching_ and--

“Hunk. _Hunk_.” Matt turned off both their holograms, then rounded the table to lay a hand on Hunk’s arm, watching him with pained eyes. “It’s okay—no, stop. Just listen for a second.”

Hunk lifted his head, trying to focus on Matt’s voice and the soothing motion of his hand, rubbing up and down the length of Hunk’s arm—and not the way Hunk’s whole body had tensed up, waves of cold washing over him. Anxiety clawed at his throat, making it hard to breathe, and the rush of embarrassment that followed only made it all worse. Matt had already witnessed one panic attack this week; the last thing Hunk wanted was a repeat performance.

He closed his eyes, trying to calm himself. It seemed like any little thing could set him off these days, and even the Ativan waiting in his pocket no longer had the power to reassure him. One little pill—what difference could it possibly make? After his last panic attack, Matt had gone with Hunk to see Coran and ask whether the castle had any way to synthesize more Ativan. It didn't. Sure, Altea had had that kind of tech, but apparently it had been new even back when Voltron was a household name, and the castle-ship wasn't on the short list for early access. So here Hunk was, stuck with his last life saver burning a hole in his pocket waiting for the day things finally reached the breaking point.

“Shiro--” he began, though his thoughts were in too much of a jumble to know where he meant to take the sentence. He just knew that Shiro was counting on him, and Hunk couldn’t let him down.

“Shiro’s fine,” Matt said, forcefully, calmly, his voice at odds with the shadows under his eyes that said maybe he hadn’t been sleeping as well as Hunk had assumed. Were any of them? Were they all slowly working themselves to death, too high-strung to admit they needed to step back, too tied up in the problems of the universe to let themselves relax?

And Shiro—Shiro was the least _fine_ of any of them. Oh, sure, he was holding himself together, mostly. He was managing that where the others could see him. But he had a tracking device in his arm and a chip that gave Haggar free access to his mind, and no amount of staring at the schematics had brought Hunk any closer to identifying either.

“I know, Hunk,” Matt said, because apparently Hunk had been babbling. “I’m frustrated too, but pushing yourself past your limits isn’t going to help anyone.” He paused, the motion of his hand slowing. “I’m doing it, too, Hunk. I know I am, and I know it’s not healthy, but I’ve at least got Shiro trying to keep me from overdoing it. When was the last time you took a break?”

Hunk hesitated. “I was going to take one after dinner,” he lied.

Matt frowned, and Hunk felt the anxiety close tighter around his throat. There _had_ to be a way to figure this out before Haggar tracked them down, took control of Shiro, turned him against his friends…

“Okay, nope.” Matt stood, tugging on Hunk’s arm. “Come on. We’re taking a break.”

“Matt, I can’t--”

“One hour,” Matt said, staring hard at Hunk. “You can pick what we do, but we are spending at least one hour away from those schematics. Cook something, watch a movie, let me teach you some Altean card games, take a _nap_ , Hunk, I don’t _care_.”

Hunk hesitated. An hour wouldn’t really hurt anything, would it? He’d put in plenty of hours already, and made no progress. And his head _was_ feeling muddy today. Maybe it would do him some good to come at the problem with fresh eyes.

But before he could agree to Matt’s terms, the intercom chimed, the signal for a standard all-call to the bridge. Not an emergency, but not optional. Hunk squeezed his eyes shut, trying to ignore the band of pressure that had only just begun to loosen from around his chest.

Well, if they ended up going on a mission, that would at least give him time with Yellow, and she always found a way to siphon off the anxiety that dogged Hunk’s steps. Hell, maybe Pidge knew what they were doing, setting up shop in their hangar. Hunk might have to give that a try.

Later, though. Right now, he had a job to do.

* * *

Hunk and Matt were the last ones to the bridge. Allura took one glance at them and her mood—already hovering in the nervous expanse between pessimistic and downright dismal—took a nosedive. Both looked half asleep on their feet, dark circles under their eyes, steps dragging as they joined the other paladins. Keith was already on his feet, and Matt dropped gratefully into the red paladin’s station. Shay took one look at Hunk and quickly vacated her spot in the other chair.

Allura frowned. “What’s wrong with you two? You look like you haven’t slept in a week!”

Matt looked up guiltily, and Hunk froze halfway down onto his chair, avoiding Allura’s gaze. “Sorry,” Matt said. “We’ve got a lot of projects going on. We… might have overdone it.”

There was nothing in his voice to say his words were anything less than simple truth, but Allura saw the way his eyes darted briefly toward Shiro.

 _Of course._ The whole team had been understandably shaken by the revelation of the override in Shiro’s arm, even more so after the mysterious Hythan’s claims that Shiro was being tracked. It had been bad enough for those of them who could do nothing except take on more of the chores so that Hunk, Matt, Pidge, and Coran had more time to address the real problem.

But those four had worked with a feverish urgency to try to unravel the secrets of Shiro’s arm. The amount of pressure they were all under was more than a trained soldier could be expected to bear, let alone three humans still adapting to their role as paladins.

It seemed Allura had waited too long to step in.

She turned her gaze toward Pidge, who seemed more alert than their brother and Hunk, if only marginally. They seemed to hold a personal interest in the information that might be found on Maorel, a desperation that bordered on obsession, and Allura doubted they would consent to stay behind, even if she suggested it.

But perhaps she could get the other two to stay here and rest. Maorel would likely be too heavily guarded for a full assault, anyway, so Allura could justify sending a smaller team. Hunk and Matt never needed to know she was keeping them back for their own good.

“Right.” Shiro straightened, frowning at Allura as though trying to pick apart the reason for her prolonged silence. Whether or not he found an answer, Allura didn’t know, but he turned to the other paladins, then nodded at Pidge. “Now that everyone’s here, let’s get started. Pidge, why don’t you tell everyone what you found?”

Pidge typed a series of commands on their gauntlet’s keyboard, and the holomap powered up, showing the planet Maorel. It was the only intact planet in a system otherwise swarming with asteroids, and the castle’s systems had very little to say about it. Average gravity, breathable atmosphere, but no vegetation. The long-range scanners showed no signs of civilization, but Pidge remained adamant that a base existed somewhere on the planet. Cloaked, perhaps, or buried so deep the castle couldn’t detect it from this distance.

“Keith and I were going through the records from Vel-17,” Pidge said, staring up at the hologram with an unnervingly intense stare. “They mentioned a lab here, on Maorel. I think its where they make robeasts.”

Suddenly everyone was paying very close attention to what Pidge had to say.

“Wait,” Hunk said. “If this is where they make robeasts, doesn’t that mean there are going to be robeasts? Here? Like a lot of them?”

Pidge blinked at him. “Most likely, yes.”

“Which is why this won’t be an ordinary mission,” Allura said. She stepped forward, drawing the paladins’ eyes to her. “We cannot risk a battle here. One robeast is challenge enough; if there are half a dozen here, or _more_ , we don’t stand a chance.”

“So we go in quiet,” Shiro said, and somehow he made it sound as if they’d discussed this beforehand. Allura met his eyes, and he glanced at Matt and Hunk so quickly Allura doubted anyone else saw.

Allura smiled, pleased that he'd picked up on her thoughts. “Yes,” she said. “Pidge, Coran, have you figured out how the Galra are tracking Shiro?”

“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Coran said. “None of our scanners detect any sort of signal coming from his arm. Nothing that Zarkon should be able to detect from more than a system away, at any rate.”

Allura grimaced. “Very well. Then we’ll just have to be quick about this. It took nearly thirty minutes for the fleet to show up last time, so that gives us some wiggle room.”

“Quick about _what_ , exactly?” Matt asked. “If they’re making robeasts there, doesn’t that mean there are prisoners down there? People like Simsil and Aurel?”

“This is _not_ a rescue mission,” Allura said, before Matt could get there. “We don’t have the resources for anything like that. It’s too loud, and it takes too long. We’re here for information only—with luck, that information will enable us to stop Project Robeast in its tracks.”

Matt looked mutinous, and Allura turned away. He was stubborn at the best of times, and she doubted sleep deprivation was helping matters any.

“We’ll have two teams on the ground for this one,” she said. “Shiro and I will come in from one side. Pidge and Lance, you’ll take the Green Lion down to our second entry point.”

“What about me?” Keith demanded. “I’m the Galra here—if anyone can move around in there undetected, it’s me.”

“In full paladin armor?” Allura asked, shaking her head. “Too many people know you. Besides, I need you and Matt to stay back. If things go wrong, we’ll need the Red Lion ready to cover our escape.”

“You too, Hunk, Shay.” Shiro fixed them both with a solemn look. “If this goes bad, it’s going to go _bad_. Who knows,” he added, lightening his voice a little. “It might be just the chance you need to sync up.”

Hunk laughed feebly, though he looked uncomfortable at the thought of staying behind. Shay, on the other hand, seemed relieved. She’d gone rigid when Matt brought up the prisoners, and Allura knew the young Balmeran wouldn’t have been able to stomach a walk through an enemy prison knowing she was going to have to leave the victims behind.

Truth be told, Allura wasn’t certain Lance would be able to stomach it, either, but she wasn’t about to send Pidge in alone.

“We go in, we get whatever information we can, and we get out,” Allura said, watching Lance especially as she spoke. He caught her gaze and held it, tensing at her implication. “Fifteen minutes, and we’re gone.”

* * *

Val’s steps slowed as she entered the hangar. It was _massive_ , bigger than a football stadium, with dozens of ships lined up inside. She didn’t get much of a chance to look around, of course; the guards escorting her prodded her with their guns until she got moving again.

She didn’t care. She was _here_. The hangar. Her way out.

Now if she could just find her way back here without the guards and _with_ someone who knew how to fly one of these things… then she might be in business.

First she had to survive her own bluff. She’d been thrilled at first when she realized that not only had Vanda taken the bait, but she wasn’t even bothering to blindfold Val for the walk to the metaphorical front door. That was before Val realized that the indifference might not be mere overconfidence.

It didn’t matter _what_ Val saw if she wound up dead before the day was out.

No. She couldn’t afford to think like that. She was going to take Vanda down to Earth, show her around some caves and try to convince the woman Val had just forgotten how to get to the Altean cache where all the writings were, then hope to God Vanda didn’t kill her on the spot.

Six guards had accompanied Val and Vanda to the hangar—two Galra and four robots, all with guns, all at least a foot taller than her—and more were waiting on the ship Vanda led them to. Val shouldn’t have been surprised at the choice. This ship was several times larger than the other ships in the hangar, built for something closer to twenty people than two, and decked out with glowing purple crystals and magenta symbols painted across the hull.

Honestly, the whole thing just _screamed_ ‘insecure yuppie egomaniac probably overcompensating for her tiny fangs.’

Two of the robots kept tight hold of Val’s arms (like she’d actually try something trapped on a tiny ship with more than a dozen armed guards) and positioned her at the back of the cockpit. Vanda stepped up behind the pilot and spoke in low tones as the ship powered up. Val would have expected a roar of engines, but all she got was a quiet whine, a rumbling in her toes, and a queasy sensation as the ship began to move.

Vanda rounded on Val. “All right, human, where are we going?”

“The canyons,” Val said, licking her lips. “Out in the desert near where that ship crashed. It’s… technically it’s on Garrison property, I guess, but--”

Vanda waved her hand. She was smiling— _smiling!_ And maybe it was Val’s imagination, but she seemed more relaxed now. It could have been simply that Val had given a destination, that this hadn’t all been a poorly thought out escape attempt (which, excuse you, this was a very _well_ thought out escape attempt). But Val couldn’t help thinking that Vanda was soothed by the destination itself.

Had she _expected_ the Altean cache to be on Garrison property?

 _Hell,_ Val thought. She knew Vanda and Iverson were working together, but somehow she’d assumed it was a recent thing. Like Lance and the others had gotten caught up in the initial chaos. If Vanda’s goal was right underneath the Garrison, though… There was no way that was a coincidence.

What, then? Had Vanda struck up this alliance because she needed to dig under Iverson’s nose? Or was the Garrison itself stationed out there in the desert to dig for Vanda?

Impossible—the Garrison was decades old. Or… the academy was. They’d only turned it into a full-fledged base five years ago, and seized all the land for miles around to give them room for training exercises and weapons testing and… And to give them privacy as they hunted for ancient alien artifacts? God, Val was turning into a genuine conspiracy theorist.

Suddenly they were in space, the Earth impossibly big. Val felt like she’d just been punched in the gut, her blood rushing in her ears as she realized just how close to home she’d been all this time. So close—close enough that her family might have seen the prison ship in orbit and mistaken it for just another star, just another satellite, just another nothing worth thinking about.

She tried to focus on her breathing as the pilot brought them in. Oceans expanded beneath her, the atmosphere burned red against the windshield, and clouds swallowed them then thinned to nothing.

It was night in Carlsbad, and Val could see the city as a cluster of lights in the distance, a bright spot in the middle of the wide, dark desert, with other clusters visible in the distance. The ship came down over the mountains, swift and silent, and Val did her best to guide them to the canyons.

Not that it mattered where, exactly, they set down, but she had to make a show of it. She thanked whatever fate had made the Galra wary of watching eyes, as the darkness would make her disorientation that much more believable. She’d wondered, idly, over the course of her imprisonment whether the Galra’s glowing yellow eyes were a sign of night vision. If so, maybe they assumed she could see in the dark as well as they did.

Val scuffed her feet along the ground as they disembarked, arms spread wide in search of rock walls she might run into unawares. She could see well enough, she supposed; the night was clear and the moon was near full. But Vanda didn’t need to know that.

“I can’t see anything,” she complained, stumbling along as one of the robots nudged her with its gun. “Why the hell did we have to come at night?”

Vanda growled, but didn’t grace her with a reply.

 _Fine._ Val could play passive-aggressive as well as anyone. “You know, if I break my leg out here, you’re not gonna have anyone to show you where the writings are.”

Luminous eyes turned toward her, and Val couldn’t help her flinch. It was like catching a mountain lion with your flashlight, that glint of predatory awareness, that instant of primal terror where your head wanted to run but your body didn’t remember how.

Eventually, practicality won out, and one of the Galra tossed Val over his shoulder to carry her into the canyons. Not the most dignified way to travel, but it was better than fumbling along over loose rocks and cracks the perfect size for a sprained ankle.

Of course, now that she didn’t have her feet to worry about, there was nothing to distract her from the insistent tug at her gut. Home was so close. Her parents, her brother. Lance’s family, and Karen and Eli and Akira. Less than an hour away by car.

On foot, surrounded by her enemies, it might as well have been the full length of the universe.

It took the better part of an hour for Val to spot _any_ cavern entrance in the darkness. There would have been no way to identify it from any other hole in the rock, so it was lucky Val wasn’t looking for any one in particular. She’d been leading the Galra around as best she could, trying to sound like she was just a little confused, and not like she was pointing at the paths that looked like they would give the Galra the most trouble.

“Are you _sure_ this thing knows where it’s going?” one of the guards muttered, and Val would have protested being called an _it_ if Vanda hadn’t been faster.

“If not, this will all have been a waste of my time,” Vanda growled, her eyes steady on Val’s face. “And I think she knows how very bad for her that would be.”

Val huffed, crossing her arms as her guard set her down. It was cold in the desert at night, especially this late into the fall. It had to be October by now, and Val was dressed only in the thin prison jumpsuit. She’d thought her cell on the prison ship was cold, but at least there she’d had Yir to keep her warm.

“It’s not _my_ fault you brought me here at night,” Val muttered, but she trudged deeper into the cavern, glad when the Galra sent drones floating ahead of them with glowing crystals dangling beneath them. Val supposed down here there was no chance of being spotted, so they were willing to risk the light.

Hey, whatever kept Val from falling down a hole. The thought of starving to death in a cave twenty miles from home was even more depressing than the notion of getting shot trying to escape to find a giant, all-powerful space juggernaut with robot lions for building blocks. (Lions! Like Voltron was some bad crossover between _The Lion King_ and _Transformers_. God, she really was losing it.)

“How much longer?” Vanda demanded after twenty minutes, pushing her way to the front of the group.

Val hunched her shoulders, trying to hide her unease. “It’s just up here. I’m sure of it.” She paused, measuring the silence. “Mostly sure.”

“ _Mostly_?”

Val allowed herself one fleeting scowl at Vanda’s boot. “Well, excuse me, Commander. I’m tired and hungry and confused, and I’ve spent the last month in a metal box, and then you drag me out here in the middle of the night? You’re lucky I haven’t walked right off a cliff!”

Vanda let her lead them in circles for a few more hours. Val spotted some weird cave paintings at one point and latched onto it as a landmark.

But the caves were big—big enough that Vanda couldn’t be certain that Val was lying through her teeth. Val was pretty sure the Galra had gotten turned around during the hike; one of them kept checking their position on a map that displayed on a holographic screen above his arm, and the rest groaned at every intersection and squinted at the branching tunnels like they couldn’t be sure whether or not they’d been there before.

As near as Val could figure, that was all that saved her life. Some paintings of saber-tooth tigers that Vanda was more than willing to believe were connected to the Alteans. A maze of tunnels that even had the robots marching a little slower than usual.

And a growing fatigue that seemed to be affecting them all. None of the guards were as bad off as Val, who’d been dead on her feet for the last hour, but they were tiring, and Val knew Vanda was going to have to pack it in eventually.

“Vrekt,” Vanda finally muttered, stopping at a fork in the tunnel.

Val plodded onward, her breath ragged, her feet aching, probably bleeding. “We’re almost there,” she panted. “I swear—I _swear_. Just—five more minutes. I know we’re close--”

She didn’t see the fist coming, and she hit the ground hard, too exhausted to catch herself. Her hip took the brunt of the landing, and her head cracked against a stone, and she curled in on herself, air hissing between her teeth as she willed the tears away. She would not cry where Vanda could see her. She _wouldn’t_. The vile woman didn’t deserve the satisfaction.

When she was certain her eyes would remain dry, she lifted her head and glared at Vanda. “I’m _not_ lying to you. I _saw_ the writing down here. I just--”

“We’ve been down here for hours,” Vanda said. “And you’ve found nothing.”

The moment of truth was upon her, and Val found she wasn’t prepared in the slightest. Now was when Vanda decided whether the chance of finding this cache was worth keeping Val alive. She prayed it was. There were dozens of Galra here—hundreds, maybe—but they were paranoid of discovery. Val had to hope that the labyrinthine caverns were daunting enough that Vanda would hang onto her guide, at least for a few more days. At least for _one more day_.

Finally, Vanda scoffed and turned her back on Val, who remained sprawled on the ground, her hip and head aching, her feet sore and singing their relief at finally being given a moment’s rest.

“We will return tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that,” Vanda said. “You _will_ find this cache. For each night you fail, the punishment will grow more severe.” She turned her head, eyes cold and bright. “You would do well not to try my patience.”

Val bowed her head and muttered that of course she wouldn’t, she would find the cache, she would prove herself. Inside, she felt ready to melt. One more day of life. One more day, and she’d seen the way to the hangar.

She would escape yet. Somehow she would.

* * *

The Black and Green Lions launched as soon as the castle exited the wormhole. From her place behind Shiro in Black’s cockpit, Allura could sense her team—Lance and Pidge tense in Green’s cockpit, Lance whispering jokes into Pidge’s ear to make them laugh and loosen their death grip on the controls; Hunk and Matt half asleep on the bridge and struggling not to show it; Keith restlessly pacing behind Zelka and Tev and unaware of their uneasy gazes; Shay quiet beside Coran, watching the mission unfold in tense anticipation.

Shiro reached out for her through their bond, trying to soothe her nerves. And her guilt over leaving Hunk and Matt behind. Shiro knew why she’d done it, and he agreed. They’d been working themselves too hard lately.

His reassurances might have been more convincing if he hadn’t been drowning in his own guilt and anxiety. He blamed himself for Matt and Hunk’s exhaustion, which was like a prisoner blaming himself for the wounds his rescuers sustained while freeing him: true only in the most technical of senses. Any of the other paladins knew that the blame really lay with Zarkon’s empire.

Shiro’s mood soured at the unspoken comparison, and Allura extended an apology.

“It’s fine,” Shiro said, muting the comms. “It’s not your fault.”

With a sigh, Allura resisted the urge to physically reach out for him. “It’s not yours, either. And stop worrying about the tracking device.”

Shiro stiffened momentarily, then let out a weak chuckle. “I keep forgetting we kind of share a brain.”

“We do,” Allura said, “so you know what I think of the matter.”

“You think it’s a minor inconvenience at worst,” Shiro said, grimacing. “And I keep telling you, you’re wrong. Zarkon knows where I am. One of these days he’s going to send more than a single warship to stop us.”

“And when he does, Voltron will meet him.” How long had it been since they’d last formed Voltron in battle? Weeks. The paladins were holding up just fine on their own—especially with the new paladins joining the ranks. Keith and Matt had unlocked a drastic increase in speed and agility, and even Allura could feel the Black Lion moving just a little quicker, drawing just a little more strength than she’d had access to before.

They were all growing stronger.

“We’ve always proceeded cautiously before,” Allura said. “When we enter a system, we hold back to observe the defenses. Even then, Zarkon has never managed to mobilize his forces until we’re well into a mission. If we move quickly, we’ll be out before Zarkon has a chance to do anything at all.”

Shiro shook his head, unconvinced, but Maorel loomed large in their viewscreen. There was no more time for argument. “I hope you’re right,” he said, and took them in.

The laboratory took only a few minutes to find. It was the only structure on the planet, but it was built on the scale of giants. The whole complex seemed to comprise a single story, but that one story was ten times Allura’s height. Two dozen round buildings, each large enough around for the castle-ship to land within its walls, dotted the bottom of a massive canyon, a chain stretched out like the long-dry river. Impossibly small hallways connected the buildings.

As they drew nearer, Allura realized these hallways were average in size, but they were dwarfed by the surrounding buildings.

“It looks like the roofs of these buildings open,” Shiro said, heading for one near the southern end of the chain.

Lance whistled, long and low. “Take a look at the BLIP-tech.”

Shiro switched the display, and Allura’s heart leaped into her throat. There were, of course, the usual Galra and sentries patrolling the complex. But there were other signatures, as well. These Black highlighted in blue so her pilots could easily distinguish between the Galra and their prisoners.

The color coding, in this case, was hardly necessary.

In each of the two dozen buildings was a single, massive life signature, part organic, part inorganic. The vitals were weak for creatures that size, and the scanner flagged each with a tiny _Unknown species_ marker.

“Looks like we found the robeasts,” Pidge muttered.

Shiro set the Black Lion down behind the building he’d chosen, checked the cloaking device—twenty-five minutes left—and sealed his helmet. “It looks like it. And this just reinforces what we already know. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t want to try fighting twenty-four robeasts at once.”

The others were all, to one extent or another, unhappy with the situation, but they all agreed with Shiro. And they knew the information they could gather here would do more good, and help more people, than one rushed rescue attempt.

Allura sealed her own helmet, checked to be sure the drone Pidge called Roswell was following, then headed out with Shiro. As soon as her hands left the twin pedestals in Black’s cockpit, her connection with Shiro, and with the other paladins, faded. She stepped out into the shadows of the canyon feeling oddly empty.

But Allura watched in silence as Shiro cut their way in. They hadn’t seen any doors on the outside of the building; indeed the only way in or out appeared to be the hangar doors on the roofs.

“We’re in,” Allura said as she and Shiro headed deeper into the complex.

“Us, too.” Lance’s voice was low and serious. Allura knew he’d been among the most reluctant to leave the prisoners behind, second only to Matt himself. But Lance made no arguments as the mission proceeded.

Shiro paused to glance around a corner. “Remember, we want to be out of this system entirely within fifteen minutes. Find a computer, hack in, and get out.”

“We _know_ ,” said Pidge. They’d headed to one of the outlying buildings. It was smaller than the building Shiro and Allura were in, and Pidge suspected it might be a kind of command center. Allura resisted the urge to remind them that it was likely to be more heavily guarded if that was true, reminding herself that Pidge and Lance were as much paladins as her. They could handle themselves.

Allura and Shiro moved quickly, but with no clear destination in mind, their progress was slow. The corridor they’d entered into spiraled around the outside of the building, lined with storage rooms, guard stations, labs, and other such rooms. They saw no computers.

Seven minutes into their allotted fifteen, they stumbled upon an observation deck, and Allura promptly forgot how to breathe.

A robeast lay in the middle of a massive cylinder of a room, sprawled on its back. Its head on the end of its long neck was small and sharp-angled, and two pairs of beady eyes flickered back and forth as Galra drones buzzed around it. It let out a whine like a kicked yupper, only many times larger.

Networks of scaffolding surrounded the beast’s torso, which appeared to be only half finished. The creature had no limbs, no weapons. It seemed unable to move anything but its eyes.

“Oh, _quiznak_ ,” Allura breathed.

“What?” Matt demanded. “What is it?”

Shiro licked his lips, his eyes wide and white. He took one trembling step back from the observation window. “It’s a robeast,” he said. “Still under construction, from the look of it. It’s… It seems to be aware of what’s happening.”

Allura hadn’t thought it possible to feel sorry for a robeast, but she felt so now. She felt sick to her stomach, though she forced her distress down. “It can’t be helped,” she said, keeping her voice firm. “We’re here for information.”

Shiro nodded, and they moved on, heading higher into the building.

On the comms, Pidge gave a soft cry of triumph. “Finally! Found the computers. I’m plugging in now.”

“Good,” said Allura. “Get what you can and--”

Before Allura could finish her sentence, an alarm pierced the silence, red lights flashing along the corridor.

They’d been discovered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brings us to the end of the CORE research logs the team found on Vel-17. I've compiled the excerpts from chapters 1-12 on a single page [here](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/157795103469/tumblr_om20kjnt1d1ttvln6) for anyone who wants to reread them.
> 
> Update 5/11/17: [@imakethingsigrowthings](http://imakethingsigrowthings.tumblr.com) drew Azra in her dress! [Tell me this isn't the cutest thing you've ever seen.](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/160567402669/imakethingsigrowthings-ive-been-sucked-into-the)


	13. Hypocrisy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... After saving Akira from Iverson's assassination attempt, Naomi took him back to her house. She invited Karen and Eli over, and shared with them her theory for what really happened to the Garrison Three: Aliens.
> 
> Dez was making slow progress in her work to clear Thace's name--not helped by Prorok hovering over her work. She gained access to the restricted files Thace had been combing through, and started contemplating how to track down the person who framed him.
> 
> Meanwhile, Team Voltron's resident scientists aren't making much progress on figuring out the inner workings of Shiro's arm, but Pidge made it through the last of the research logs from Vel-17 and found a reference to a robeast research lab on the planet Maorel. Shiro, Allura, Pidge, and Lance went down in Black and Green to infiltrate the base in search of information, but before they could find anything, their presence was discovered.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter warrants a special warning for violence. Not gore--the worst of it is some blood from unspecified wounds--but there is implied torture and implied/discussed minor character death that are more...weighty than usual.
> 
> To skip the (discussion of) minor character death, skip the scene that begins, "It seemed the air had gone out of Shiro's lungs."
> 
> To skip the (implied) torture, stop reading at, "The fifth day" and skip the rest of the scene. (It's the last scene of the chapter, fyi)
> 
> There's also a possible trigger for dysphoria (brief mention of Akira's binder) in the fist scene. Skip the paragraph that begins, "Akira rolled his eyes," as necessary.

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #1.1  
>  Dated two years before the return of Voltron.**
> 
> A Note on Quintessence and Synthetic Q:
> 
> Quintessence is the basis of life. This is one of the first facts a child learns upon commencement of their education. All living beings consume Quintessence, and all—with very few exceptions—produce far less than they need to survive. Habitable planets, sometimes called “living planets” or “vital planets,” are those which produce Quintessence in their core sufficient to support the planet’s ecosystem. The only known species to produce an excess of Quintessence is the Balmera, massive spacefaring creatures that produce the crystals used in most imperial technology.
> 
> For millennia, our scientists and druids have sought to synthesize Quintessence from other organic material in order to end our dependence upon the Balmera. Economic concerns, inter-species politics, and ecological ramifications of widespread mining operations have all contributed to the scarcity of battleship-class crystals, which are needed for the upkeep and expansion of the Galra army.
> 
> Synthetic Q was first produced as part of the CORE Initiative three standard years ago, in 9871 Imperial, following the isolation of the enzyme bal-q II from the nodal tissue of Balmera T-32-Ket. Test subjects given daily doses of synthetic Q in a Quintessential void experienced none of the psychological effects expected from extended deprivation, but they showed rapid physical decay proportional to synthetic Q dosage. Subject 17, part of the highest dosage test group, remotely accessed biometric locks on her cell door and attempted an escape. She was recaptured and died shortly thereafter, but the incident led to the characterization of technopathic abilities in all of the high-dosage test subjects. Unfortunately, none of them survived longer than twenty solar cycles, which minimizes the practical application of these findings.
> 
> It is hypothesized that naturally occurring Quintessence contains secondary compounds lacking in synthetic Q. Other ongoing research aims to identify these missing compounds, but our research here on Maorel is focused on studying the effect of the current formula on test subjects, mitigating physical damage, and integrating technopathic abilities into the armed forces.

* * *

Eli was the only one who believed Naomi’s alien theory. He supposed he couldn’t blame Karen or Akira—they were both profoundly practical types, after all, Karen a lawyer, Akira basically a soldier. However much they wanted to hope their families were okay, they wouldn’t let themselves be taken in by a farfetched theory.

A few months ago, when Karen had first approached him after Hunk’s memorial service with her hunt for the truth, Eli had been much the same. Once you started believing conspiracy theories, it became very hard to stop. He’d refused Karen’s request for help at first because he feared opening that door would keep him from ever finding peace with Hunk’s death.

Maybe he’d been right to worry, because now here he was, legitimately considering the possibility of an alien abduction rather than seeking closure.

He couldn’t help it. It was an oddly compelling theory.

Granted, Naomi’s idea of proof was pretty thin. The video of the supposed alien ship taking off the morning after the accident, a few more photos of strange craft in the sky near the Garrison, a dim purple star visible just before dawn the next day, which Naomi claimed was either an engine’s glow, a weapon, or some kind of wormhole. And, of course, the “transmission.”

Akira hobbled into the Holts’ kitchen as Eli replayed the recording and shook his head. “You’re _still_ listening to that?”

Eli shushed him. Akira may have denounced the garbled recording as a hoax from the start (“It’s some garble foreign broadcast, not aliens!”) but Eli had since found other, similar recordings online, some dating back more than a year. If this was a hoax, it was a long-running one, especially considering how little traction it had gained.

It was the day after Akira had been shot, and by unanimous agreement Mama Holt’s Army had regrouped at Karen’s house. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust Naomi—she’d saved Akira’s life, after all, and anyway she already knew how to find them.

It was just that they all felt safer on familiar soil. Naomi remained convinced that Iverson wouldn’t make an attempt on either Karen or Eli—not unless he got _really_ desperate—for fear of public backlash, but she warned them to stay alert. She herself was going back to the Garrison. With Akira’s cover blown, she was now their only source of information.

 _That_ was the part that had Karen on edge, and Eli hadn’t yet figured out whether she thought Naomi would deliberately feed them misinformation, or just that she wouldn’t be able to tell the good from the bad.

The recording ended, and Eli leaned back in his chair, stretching.

Akira, now seated across the table from him with a bowl of cereal, raised his eyebrows. “You don’t seriously think your nephew was abducted by aliens.”

“I think it’s worth considering,” Eli said neutrally, “and I think you should have let me get the cereal for you.”

Akira rolled his eyes. He was wearing some of Matt’s old clothes—too short on him, and a little tight through the chest and shoulders—but Naomi had somehow managed to sneak Akira’s best binder out of his quarters at the Garrison, a gesture that made Eli more inclined to trust her and Akira only more suspicious.

“My ankle’s fine, Eli,” Akira said. “A couple more days and I won’t even need to wrap it.”

He didn’t say anything about his shoulder, Eli noticed, which was a rare stroke of honesty. You didn’t recover from a gunshot wound in a day and a half, no matter how stubborn you were. Eli shook his head. “You could stand to relax for a couple days.”

Akira grinned impishly. “I do that, and you’ll probably have us all charging off into the desert to contact the aliens with the blue ship.”

“Yeah, yeah, have your laughs.” Eli shook his head. “Be grateful I don’t sit you down and talk you through all the evidence I’ve found online.”

“Evidence?” Akira leaned his cheek on his hand. “Now this I’ve got to hear.”

“Soon,” Eli said. “I’ve got a million photos and videos and a couple dozen audio clips like the one Naomi showed us. And some more reports of mysterious disappearances. But I’ve got a ways to go before I decide if it’s true or just a very popular theory.”

“At least you haven’t _completely_ abandoned reason.” Karen dropped her briefcase on an empty chair as she entered the room, then paused to step into her work shoes. She looked haggard—Naomi’s call had pulled her out of the office early yesterday, and she’d been up late trying to make up for lost time. She shrugged into her coat and silently accepted the bagel Eli offered her for the road. “Please try not to get lost in all your fringe theories while I’m gone.”

Eli smiled. “No promises.”

“Hmm.” Karen smiled tightly at him, bit off a mouthful of bagel, and waved over her shoulder as she headed out the door.

As the front door shut behind her, Akira tossed back his head and guzzled the sugary milk in the bottom of his bowl. When he finished, he set the bowl down with a _thunk._ “So what’s the plan for today?”

“Research, outreach, drumming up trouble...” Eli yawned. “Basically, trawling the internet to make Iverson’s life miserable. You can help if you want, but I think you’re beyond entitled to a couple of days off.”

Akira nodded, thoughtful. “Actually...”

“Yeah?”

Akira hesitated, drumming his fingers on the tabletop. “I was thinking—what if I told my story? The way Karen talked about her family.”

Eli ginned. “I think that would put one hell of a rock in Iverson’s shoe, if you’re really up to it.”

“I am.”

“Great.” Eli stood, then hesitated. It was half past eight in New Mexico, half past five in Hawaii. Lana would be up by now, getting ready for the school day. If he called now, they wouldn’t have time to get too deep into the mess of things he’d been meaning to talk to his sisters about.

Short talk now, he figured—just enough to test the waters—long, exhausting talk later tonight.

“Give me twenty minutes,” he said to Akira. “I’ve got a phone call to make.”

Upstairs in Pidge’s room—the best balance he could find between preserving his own privacy and respecting Karen’s—Eli pulled out his phone. He called up Lana’s number, hesitated, then made the call.

“Little early for a chat, don’t you think?” Lana said when she picked up.

Eli smiled to hear her voice, bright and cheerful despite her affected annoyance. Most of their conversations since the memorial had been thick with tears. “Sorry,” he said. “I wanted to catch you before work. Akani there?”

“Still sleeping,” Lana said. “There was some issue with an invoice yesterday and she had to stay late.”

Eli hummed in acknowledgment. He was trying to sound casual as he searched for the right words, but Lana had sharp ears, as usual.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

With a sigh, Eli sat on the edge of Pidge’s bed and stared at the poster on the wall, a string of binary code Eli couldn’t decipher. “Have you been hearing the news about the Garrison lately?”

“The Garrison?” Lana’s voice turned sharp. “Eli, I thought we agreed we were done with those people.”

“I know, I know. Lana, listen--”

She huffed. “Okay, yes. I saw something online the other day, something about a woman who went missing during a visit? I don’t know, Eli, like I said. I try not to listen when the subject comes up.”

Well, at least she hadn’t found out through the news. “I knew that woman.”

Lana went silent. Even the rustling in the background as she got ready for the day had stopped. “What?”

“That woman. Her name was Val Mendoza. Lance Mendoza—you know, Hunk’s pilot? She was his cousin.”

“Eli...” Lana’s voice held a warning. “What are you trying to say?”

Eli weighed how much to tell her. There would be time later to tell the full story, but he hadn’t called now just to skirt the issue altogether. He sighed. “I’ve been talking with the families of the other cadets,” he said. “Lance and Pidge’s families. We think there was more to that accident. We think the Garrison was responsible.” He heard Lana breathe in, ready to unload on him, and he hurried on. “Val was trying to find out the truth, and she went missing.”

“ _Eli,_ ” Lana said, her voice shaking. “If you’re calling me at six o’clock in the goddamn morning to tell me you might be about to get yourself killed, I will jump on a plane this instant and come kick your ass.”

With a laugh, Eli flopped backward on the bed. “Nothing like that, Lana,” he said, though it was only somewhat true. The attack against Akira had shaken Eli. Before now, he’d hoped to keep Lana and Akani out of the emotional turmoil of this investigation. Now he just didn’t want her to lose someone else without a chance to say goodbye.

“Then why are you calling me? Why are you calling _now_?”

“We’re starting to make waves, Lana,” he said. “I just didn’t want you to hear from someone else that I’ve got a personal vendetta against Iverson.”

“We all have a personal vendetta against that man. Even Akani. What are you planning?”

“That’s an awfully long story, Lana. Give me a call when you and Akani have a while to talk, okay?”

He could hear Lana’s frown in the silence that followed. “Fine. You’d damn well better pick up.”

“I will,” he promised. “Have a good day, Lana.”

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” she responded, and hung up before Eli stopped laughing.

* * *

Coran rubbed stinging eyes as he monitored the battle from the command station. Tev, one of the Galra refugees who’d volunteered to help on the bridge in battle, stood at the weapons controls, holding off the defensive forces that had risen from Maorel’s surface when the paladins on the ground triggered an alarm. Zelka stood across the bridge from Tev, calling out damage reports and advising him on new attack patterns as they came.

Matt, Keith, Hunk, and Shay had already headed for their lions, their fatigue battered down for now, just as Coran’s was. He knew his head wasn’t as clear as it should be—he’d been spending several hours a day helping Matt and Hunk look into Shiro’s arm, several more showing Zelka how to repair and maintain castle systems. She, in turn, had passed the knowledge on to some of the other refugees, which was finally paying dividends, if later than Coran had hoped.

On top of all his usual duties, the new projects had left Coran hardly a moment to breathe, hardly any time with the paladins the last two or three days with the exception of Hunk, Matt, and Allura.

And now this. Coran shook his head to clear the cobwebs, grimacing as the scanners showed more heavily armored gunships rising from the planet’s surface. They’d known a robeast research lab was likely to be guarded, but Coran hadn’t expected quite this much trouble. There were enough fighters here for three warships, and the gunners were outfitted with stronger weapons that Coran was used to.

If it had still been just him on the bridge, he would have been overrun quickly, especially with the Red and Yellow Lions pressing toward the planet to clear an escape route for their comrades. As it was, victory was still far from assured.

“Get ready,” he said to Tev and Zelka as he switched over to his own weapons controls. “This is going to be a tough fight.”

* * *

“How’s it coming in there, Pidge?”

Lance’s voice was high and strained, and Pidge gritted their teeth. “I can only work so fast, Lance,” they snapped. The alarm still blared overhead, stabbing into their skull, but there was no time to hack the security system and turn it off. “Almost got the—Aw, quiznak.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Shiro muttered.

Pidge grimaced, but closed out of the door controls and went back to their first project—hacking the lab’s research records. “Well… It could be a lot worse?”

“Hey, uh, guys?” Hunk said. “Scanners are showing something big headed up from the base. That’s not… one of your lions? By any chance?”

“Sorry, Hunk,” said Pidge. “One of the robeasts launched before I could seal the doors. The rest of them are all nicely shut away, but uh.” An explosion sounded over the comms, and Pidge flinched. “Sorry.”

Keith grunted. “We’ll deal with it. Right, Hunk?”

“Uh…”

“That’s a yes,” said Matt. “How you holding up, Shay?”

Shay’s response was even less eloquent than Hunk’s, just a timid whimper as Hunk screamed and lasers whistled in the distance.

Lance fired off a few more shots, then glanced over his shoulder at Pidge, who scowled and urged the extraction to move just a little bit faster. “Hang on, guys,” they said. “I’m copying the files now. As soon as that’s done, we’ll be up there to help you.”

Turning back to the sentries clawing for entry into the records room, Lance snorted. “Assuming there’s still a way out.”

“Hey, you can always join me in the air ducts if you wanna. You’re scrawny enough.”

Lance’s shots slowed for an instant, but Pidge didn’t look up to see his reaction. A moment later, he refocused on the fight. “You know, you’re a real brat sometimes, Gunderson.”

“You’re one to talk,” they shot back, grinning.

A severed sentry head, its neck melted into a lump of indeterminate metal, bounced off the console near Pidge, making them jump. Lance cackled, and Pidge stuck their tongue out at him as they manually shut down some of the other processes running on the base’s main computer, hoping to get their progress bar to move just a little bit faster.

“Thirty-eight percent,” they said. “That’s almost halfway, right?”

Lance ducked behind the door as a concentrated salvo of lasers flew past. “I thought you were supposed to be the math whiz.”

“It’s called being an optimist.”

“Right.” Lance waited for a break in the onslaught, then jumped back in with a volley of his own. “In that case, I’m _almost_ making a dent in these guys out here.”

“Good to hear. Thirty-nine percent.”

Lance groaned.

* * *

Shiro listened to his team bicker with half an ear as he tried to navigate the twisting corridors of the lab. He and Allura had been forced out of the main corridor by a wall of Galra soldiers, and they’d spent the last five minutes trying to circle back to their lion.

The problem was, neither of them knew where they’d ended up, and their eyes in the sky were too busy with the robeast to help navigate.

“Are we even in the same building anymore?” he asked Allura as they ran, Roswell hovering overhead and firing low-powered lasers into the ranks of guards. It was all well and good Pidge had managed to trap the robeasts in their chambers (some of them _had_ to be complete already—or complete enough to pose a threat), but there were still hundreds of guards swarming the complex looking for intruders to vaporize.

Allura grunted, tossing a sentry like a shot-put and knocking down a cluster of soldiers up ahead. Shiro darted into the milieu of confused sentries and frightened Galra left in the wake of the robotic projectile, cutting down a half dozen enemies before they regrouped and forced him back.

“I’m not even sure how many floors up we are,” Allura admitted, ducking down another corridor. She’d shifted into her Galra form and carried a metal door like a shield, absorbing laser blasts from ahead of them. Shiro had his own shield out to catch attacks from behind, but it wasn’t nearly as efficient as Allura’s approach.

They turned a corner to avoid the ranks of sentries ahead, only to find this way blocked by yet more guards. The ones who had been chasing them rounded the corner behind them, cutting off their escape.

Shiro and Allura exchanged glances, and then Allura shouldered her way through a nearby door.

The room they found beyond was eerily dark, lit only by a series of canisters lined up along the far wall—each one containing a body dressed in familiar purple rags. Shiro stopped short at the sight of them, forgetting where he was until Allura cursed at him to move so she could barricade the door.

Shiro stepped aside, numb, and rubbed at his nose. He only realized what he was doing when his fingers found the ridge of his scar, and he forced himself to stop.

Allura, still grabbing crates and tables and whatever else she could find lying around, knocked into him. “Why aren’t you--?” Allura stopped in the middle of yelling at him, and he had to wonder if he looked as shell-shocked as he felt. “Shiro?”

Shiro closed his eyes, trying to blot out the images crying out for his attention. Barred cells dressed in violet shadows. The faces of his fellow prisoners, gaunt and sallow. A thin, hard bed and a bare toilet in the corner—the luxuries of the Champion.

At a hand on his arm he jumped, blinking rapidly. Allura was staring at him with scarcely concealed alarm, and Shiro felt his face grow hot.

“Looks like we found the prisoners,” he said, pushing past Allura before she could ask him if he was all right.

She grabbed his arm, tightening her grip as he tried to pull away. When he turned to glare at her, she calmly reached up and turned off her comms. She could have done so with a mental command, of course, but she meant him to see.

 _No one else is listening,_ she was telling him. _It’s just us._

Shiro grimaced and turned his eyes toward the wall of canisters, but he muted his own mic and let out a long sigh. “It’s nothing new,” he said curtly. “It just… Seeing these people like this reminded me of when I was a prisoner.” He turned back to Allura and firmed his jaw. “I’m fine.”

For a moment, Allura was silent. “The only reason I’m going to let you get away with that is because we’re in the middle of a mission. Once we’re back...”

She poked him in the chest with the tip of her finger—more intimidating than it would have been if she was in her usual form, considering he had to tip his head back to meet her yellow eyes. Something in him wanted to flinch away. Instead, Shiro wrapped his hand around her finger and tried for a smile. “I know, I know. We promised to support each other.”

“Then you’ll talk to me after this is over?”

“After,” he agreed. Hopefully by then she would have forgotten all about it.

Allura nodded, and they turned together to examine the wall of canisters. Each was ten feet tall and perhaps three across, a metal cylinder with an orange-tinted glass window running the length of the canister on the front. They were stacked three high so the top row brushed the room’s ceiling, and they stretched from one wall to the other along the back of the room—thirty six in all, and each one with a prisoner locked inside.

Some of the prisoners had extensive cybernetic modifications, some very few. All had a network of wires embedded in their scalps like an EEG headset cast in silvery metal. The canisters were filled with fluid, and the prisoners floated within, eyes closed, mouths and noses covered by masks connected to oxygen tanks on the side of each canister.

“Do you suppose they’re all part of Project Robeast?” Allura asked, her voice small.

Shiro shook his head, his skin crawling. “There aren’t this many robeasts at this lab.”

Allura walked closer to the canisters, sparing a brief glance over her shoulder as the guards outside hammered at the door. Her barricade shuddered, but held fast. “Shiro, look.”

Shiro followed her gesture to a prisoner in the second row. Long-necked and scaly-skinned, they reminded Shiro a little bit of a reptilian giraffe. If giraffes had four beady eyes and long, multi-jointed arms that twitched, delicate fingers brushing the glass.

Suddenly, Shiro recognized the creature. “Looks like the robeast we saw earlier.”

“I know.” Allura craned her neck, scanning the wall. “These prisoners may be the templates the druids use to create the robeasts. They may even control them—as much as something like that can be controlled.”

Shiro’s stomach turned. He tore his eyes away from the prisoners and scanned the room for a control panel. Allura’s words from the castle-ship echoed in his ears. _This is not a rescue mission._ Shiro had fully agreed with that decision—the mission was risky enough without adding heroics on top. But now that he was here, face to face with more of Zarkon’s victims…

“We have to get them out of there,” he said.

He turned toward Allura, expecting resistance, but her eyes stared mournfully back at him. “I suppose a slim chance is better than none at all,” she said.

Shiro smiled, wishing they were in the Black Lion so Allura could sense his gratitude. “Right,” he said. “Come on.”

* * *

Hunk screamed wordlessly as he dodged a swipe of the robeast’s serpentine limbs. The never-ending stream of fighters from the surface swarmed around them, hardly thinned by Coran and Tev’s barrage from the castle-ship. Hunk wanted to be over there, helping tear through the fighters, keeping them at bay, minimizing the disturbance to the refugees in the castle’s belly.

Unfortunately, he and Red had their hands full with the one lonely robeast who had managed to escape Pidge’s lockdown.

“How is this creature so fast?” Shay asked, grunting as she gripped the back of Hunk’s seat. The robeast had just batted them aside, and only Yellow’s gravity generators kept Shay from braining herself on the wall.

Hunk wanted to answer her—probably with a long, rambling complaint about how every single robeast they fought seemed to be faster and stronger and smarter and trickier than any of them thought possible, like the robeasts were all part of a collective consciousness that learned from each fight.

...But he was too busy trying not to die to remember how to talk.

“Damn,” Matt muttered. “This thing isn’t going to let us take a breather, is it?”

The Red Lion spun out of the way of the robeast’s next attack, ducking neatly under its sweeping arm. The monster looked a little bit like a giant metal octopus—one who’d turned its arms into a raging steel windmill of death—and it moved in quick little bursts before flaring out and whipping anything nearby with its appendages. Matt and Keith were fast enough to avoid each attack, sometimes by a thin margin, but whenever they tried to break off to support Coran against the rest of the fleet, the robeast darted in and forced them back on the defensive.

Keith grunted angrily, and the Red Lion took aim at the robeast. The octopus-thing surged forward, knocking Yellow aside once more (thankfully she had killer armor, since she obviously wasn’t built for speed), and as soon as it slowed, Red unleashed with her back-mounted cannon.

The laser was as thick as one of the robeast’s arms, and it left a shiny burn along the creature’s organic bits—but that was all it did.

Matt and Keith let out twin cries of indignation, then abandoned the attack and danced away as the robeast chased after them.

Hunk shook his head, working his jaw to ease the ache he’d created clenching his teeth so hard. “Hey, guys, not to get too naggy here, but how much longer are you gonna be? Cause, uh, I really think we’re gonna need Voltron to get through this thing’s armor.”

“Ninety percent, Hunk,” Pidge called. “You just have to hold out a few more ticks.”

Lance scoffed, firing his rifle three times in quick succession. “Yeah, and then we have to actually get _out_ of here. Not to mention get _me_ back to the castle for Blue!”

"Why did we think it was a good idea to leave your lion behind?” Keith asked. Hunk was pretty sure his sharp tone was because the octopus robeast had just come within inches of taking off Red’s ear—but he was equally sure Lance was going to take it personally.

As Lance drew in breath to retort, though, Matt let out a sigh. “He means this would be a lot easier with you at our back, Lance.”

Lance paused, fired twice more, then chuckled. “Well, when you put it like that… We’ll be on our way in a jiffy—knights in shining armor style!”

“Knights in what?” Keith asked.

Before anyone could explain damsels in distress to Keith, the robeast stopped its attack, retreating several body-lengths from the lions and curling in on itself like a giant cybernetic alien rosebud.

“What’s it doing?” Hunk asked hesitantly, letting Yellow drift as he watched the robeast for signs of attack. “Are you guys freaking out about this? Because I’m kinda freaking out about this.”

“Calm down, Hunk,” Keith said, and Hunk didn’t know whether or not to be reassured by the slight tremor in his voice. “Be ready to move.”

“Why?” Allura demanded. “What’s happening?”

Matt’s face, on the comms display, was troubled. “The robeast seems to be changing tactics. I don’t know what it’s planning, though. It’s just--”

At that moment the robeast unfurled, its legs peeling away from its core—mouth? _—_ _thing_ _—_ and spreading wide like an eldritch starfish. Something was pulsating at the mouth, a void of light that swirled and churned like an inverted version of a star, only several orders of magnitude smaller.

Beside Yellow, Red tensed, growling in anticipation of a fight. Hunk adjusted his grip on the controls, but he was slower than Matt and Keith. _Way_ slower. He just hoped his shields were up to whatever this new attack was.

The robeast flexed its legs, then spewed out a beam of the weird negative light. Red darted away, arching her back as she pirouetted over the attack. Hunk took off in the opposite direction, but he just wasn’t fast enough. Shay screamed as the blackness enveloped them.

* * *

Dez was alone in the corridor, her footsteps echoing off the walls. It was late, and this deck was restricted to high-ranking officers, most of whom would be asleep at this hour. Dez should be, too, if she was going to make any headway tomorrow on Thace’s case. Seven solar cycles, and she still had no clue who had framed him.

The door to the archives was just visible ahead when a bolt of lightning struck her in the back.

She stumbled, muscles spasming, and hit the ground hard. The breath fled her lungs, but she rolled, drawing a knife in the same motion and flinging it at her attacker—who vanished as the knife approached and reappeared directly over Dez.

A druid. _Aw, vrekt._ If she’d known it was a _druid_ , she wouldn’t have used herself as bait.

The druid dropped to his knees, pinning Dez’s wrist as she reached for her second knife, and grabbed her chin. “Who else?” he whispered, his voice a horrible rasp.

“What are you talking about?” She had a vague idea, of course. It wasn’t likely there were two people on the ship ferreting out traitors. At least, two people who weren’t working together. After several days making no progress in her efforts to find them out, Dez had had the _stunningly_ brilliant idea to let herself be caught. After all, it didn't matter _how_ they'd found Thace so much as the simple fact that they _had._

It had been a fine line to walk, exposing herself to whoever had found out Thace without _actually_ tipping her hand to Prorok, who was still breathing down her damn neck.

She supposed the plan had worked—a little _too_ well.

“Who else?” the druid demanded. “Who are you working with? Who else knows about Project Balmera?”

 _Project Balmera?_ Dez had seen the name mentioned in the files she’d reviewed, the ones Thace had accessed with his dummy accounts, but only ever in passing. The main lab was somewhere in the Hovent Sector—dead space, mostly, with only a few minor planets. It technically lay outside the Empire, but only because Zarkon hadn’t yet found it worth claiming.

Was that it then? Had the druids framed Thace because he’d come a little too close to this Project Balmera? Were they so desperate to keep it under wraps that they’d rather frame him for treason than tell Prorok the real problem?

She could worry about that later. Whether the druids knew Thace was a traitor or only feared he’d stumbled upon top secret research, whether this man was working alone or had allies, whether he’d reported back about Dez—all of it could wait. The digital trails people left behind were far less likely to lie than people themselves. Keena had taught her that.

And once Thace was a free man, he would be able to dig up every digital footprint this man had left behind.

Dez didn’t bother with words. Druids were slippery, and impossible to read. If a soldier was likely to lie, a druid was almost certain to, and leaving him alive presented far too many risks.

So Dez fought. The army had taught her to fire a rifle, to face an armed opponent in single combat, but it was the Accords who had taught her to fight dirty, with knives and hidden needles and traps. She drew her sword and slashed at the druid, who turned to smoke and retreated several steps.

Dez climbed to her feet, using the motion to hide the barbs she scattered across the floor. Then she charged, sword in one hand, knife in the other. She slashed at the druid in a ceaseless pattern, forcing him to retreat, turning him around, keeping his focus on her. She didn’t try too hard to hit him, only to make him think she was trying, and then—when he was in position—she struck.

He was so focused on her hands, so used to her striking only head-on with her blades, that he didn’t see her foot until it connected with his side. He flew backwards, landed, and rolled, then vanished as she followed up with a dagger strike.

When he reappeared on the far side of the room, he staggered, gasping in sudden pain.

Dez smiled, deactivating her sword. She kept her knife out, ready, but she knew the battle was over. The poison in the barbs she’d scattered on the floor degraded quickly—by morning there would be nothing left to serve as evidence. But now that it was in the druid’s blood, it would act quickly.

He had minutes to live.

“What is Project Balmera?” she demanded, because sometimes Keena was wrong. Sometimes men spoke true. Sometimes their words gave hints a digital trail wouldn’t provide. “Who else knows about Thace?”

The druid laughed in her face. “Project Balmera will be our salvation,” he wheezed, spasming once more before dropping to the ground, his strength fading quickly. “You are already too late to stop it.”

* * *

“Hunk? _Shay_?”

Pidge stiffened at Matt’s increasingly frantic calls for the yellow paladins. Seconds passed, the progress bar on Pidge’s screen blinked over from ninety-eight percent to ninety-nine.

Hunk and Shay didn’t answer.

Pidge looked up and found Lance staring back at them, wide-eyed, the barrel of his rifle betraying his shaking hands. They wanted to tell him it was okay, _Hunk_ was okay, but they didn’t know that any more than Lance did. All either of them knew for sure was that that after the robeast’s last attack, the Yellow Lion had gone quiet.

 _I should have gotten those doors sealed faster,_ Pidge thought, hunching over their keyboard. They’d stopped every process they could get to except those that might hamper their escape if shut down, which left nothing but to wait the last agonizing seconds for the file transfer to finish.

Thank god for Allura, who seemed to be just about the only person left who wasn’t somewhere along the road to panic. “Matt. Matt, calm down. Talk to us. What happened to the Yellow Lion?”

“I don’t know. The robeast used a new attack— _vrekt_!” The Galran swear sounded awkward on Matt’s tongue, and in another situation Pidge might have teased him for it. But not now. Not with Hunk’s fate uncertain, and sentries at the door, and only two lions in the air.

“The robeast has some new attack,” Keith grunted. He was tense, too, but his voice was more controlled than Matt’s, more angry. “Looks like an EMP, but--”

“--but the lions don’t run on electronics like Earth tech does,” Matt finished.

The computer chimed as the transfer hit one hundred percent, and Pidge hastily disconnected, summoning their bayard to help Lance carve a way out. Easier said than done; there had to be a hundred sentries out there by now. They leaned out around the door, trying to spot a clear path through the chaos, and Lance had to pull them back to safety before they got their head shot off.

“Hunk took the first hit of this new weapon,” Keith said. “His lion’s dead in the air, but we’re pretty sure it’s simple power failure. It wasn’t an actual laser or anything, so there’s no structural damage. But the comms are out, and Coran’s still busy with the rest of the fleet--” Coran yelled something distantly that Pidge took for confirmation-- “and one hit from this thing could probably knock out the castle’s shields, at the very least. We’re trying to run interference, and it’s...”

“It’s going shitty,” Matt said bluntly. “How much longer?”

Pidge and Lance exchanged looks. “The good news is the files are done transferring,” Pidge said brightly.

Matt must have heard the unspoken _but_ in their words, for he swore. “Shiro, Allura, what about you two?”

Shiro and Allura were silent, and Pidge felt a knot of dread form in their chest. “Shiro…”

Lance pressed his back against the wall and lifted his helmet to wipe sweat from his eyes. “Allura.”

“There’s been a very _slight_ change in plans,” Allura said slowly.

Scowling, Lance fired blindly into the corridor. “Okay, when you say _slight change in plans_ I hear alarms ringing. There are _already_ alarms ringing, Allura! Why are you setting off more?”

“We found the prisoners,” Shiro said, silencing Lance—and Matt, for that matter. “This wasn’t supposed to be a rescue mission, but our cover’s already blown, and they’re _right here_.”

He said it like he expected an argument. But Lance was grinning, and if Pidge knew their brother at all, they knew he would have high-fived Shiro if he was within arm’s reach and not fighting for his life. Or maybe even then.

“How much time do you need?” Keith asked.

Shiro breathed out sharply, a sound that might have been a sigh or a laugh. “Roswell should have the cells open any second now. Allura’s trying to connect with Black to have her come pick us up.”

“Wait.” Lance straightened, eyes wide. “We can _do that_?”

“It’s theoretically possible,” Allura said. “The lions will act on their own to protect their paladins in times of great need. It’s difficult to trigger consciously, though—typically it’s used as a last resort, when a paladin is in imminent danger of dying.”

Pidge shot Lance a hard stare. “That’s not a suggestion, by the way,” they said.

He stuck his tongue out at them. “I _know_. I’m not _Keith_.”

“Watch it, cargo pilot.”

Lance rolled his eyes, then cupped a hand around his mouth. “Blue!” he called. “ _Blu-ue!_ ”

Keith grunted. “Can you at least try to take this seriously?”

Lance either didn’t hear him, or didn’t care. He stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled, an ear-splitting sound that made Pidge clap their hands to their ears—not the most effective thing to do while wearing a helmet.

“Lance!” they yelled. “Cut it out! You’re making my ears bleed!”

It was then, of course, that the ceiling caved in.

Pidge yelped, summoning their shield in anticipation of an attack, but Lance just whooped exuberantly and bounded forward with a cry of, “Best! Cat! Ever!”

On the comms, Allura was spluttering in utter bafflement. “You—did you just? _What?_ ”

Laughing, Lance charged into the Blue Lion’s open mouth, and Pidge raced after him, sparing a brief glance for the hallway full of sentries. Blue’s arrival had collapsed part of the ceiling there, too, crushing a large portion of the guard force.

“Hey there, beautiful,” Lance said, sliding into the pilot’s seat. “Thanks for the save.”

Blue rumbled in a way that sounded extremely self-satisfied to Pidge, and they peeled away from the half-demolished building toward the hollow in the canyon wall where they’d left Green.

“Dropping Pidge off at their lion now, guys,” Lance said. “We’ll be up there to help in two shakes of lion’s tail.”

* * *

Hunk didn’t start breathing again until Yellow’s systems came back online. It was three, maybe four minutes—but in battle, that was an eternity. He’d spent the whole time flitting about the cockpit, popping off access panels and trying to figure out what had happened. Power failure, obviously, but he wasn’t sure yet whether the attack had broken a conduit somewhere, overloaded the system, or just knocked out the main crystal and backup power cells.

The life support systems were still up and running—had barely flickered, as a matter of fact. That tickled something in the back of his mind, but he was too worried about turning into robeast chow to give it much thought.

While he was running around like a caffeinated squirrel, Shay stood quietly in the corner, her hands pressed against the wall, her eyes closed. Hunk figured she was talking to Yellow—and the glow surrounding her hands (faint but clearly visible in the otherwise dark cockpit) said Yellow wasn’t completely dead. Heck, Hunk could sense her a little bit himself—weak, but not really _hurt—_ and he could see a fuzzy version of the battle outside through her eyes. Not much, but enough to know Red was still kicking.

In the end, Yellow fixed herself before Hunk could unravel the problem. Indicator lights blinked on one by one, catching Hunk’s attention. The main viewscreen came back on as Hunk returned to the pilot seat, followed shortly by the comms.

“Pidge!” Matt cried.

The engines finally re-engaged, and Hunk spun his lion around to find the others—the Green Lion drifting, dark like Yellow had been until a moment ago. Lance seemed to be pushing Blue to her limits to avoid the robeast’s attacks, zig-zagging across the sky like a stellar slinky. Red, the only lion nimble enough to evade the robeast easily, was peppering it with fire and lasers in an attempt to distract it.

It didn’t seem to be doing much.

“ _Pidge_!” Matt called again, his voice hoarse. “Pidge, answer me!”

“Fear not, Matt,” Shay said. “They are unharmed.”

“Yeah,” Hunk said, pulling Yellow around to the robeast’s blind spot and opening fire. “It looks like they got hit with the same thing as us, right?”

Blue executed a very loose interpretation of a somersault and fired off a wave of ice at the robeast. “Hunk! You’re okay!”

“Better than sunshine,” Hunk answered. “I think that thing was some kind of--”

“--EMP,” Keith said at the same time as Hunk. “Yeah, Matt thought so too.”

Hunk grinned in the general direction of the Red Lion’s feed. “Well, you know what they say about great minds.” He spotted a hint of a smile on Matt’s face, almost lost in the grimace of anxiety. “They’re fine, man, I promise. Yellow lost power, yeah, but the life support kicked in right away, and she fixed herself just fine.”

Matt blew out a long breath. “Good to know. Still… How are we supposed to beat this thing? Even if Shiro and Allura make it up here, we can’t form Voltron if one of our lions is out of commission.”

“What do you mean, _if_?” Shay asked. “Why are they not here now?”

“Long story,” said Keith.

Lance opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Maybe…” He shook his head. “I got nothing. Shiro? Allura? Any bright ideas? Coran?”

“Little busy at the moment, Blue.” Coran’s voice sounded distant, and Hunk didn’t immediately see him in the castle’s video feed. Not that Hunk had long to look. The robeast had just turned its attention on him, forcing him to tuck tail and skedaddle. The others unloaded on the creature, drawing its attention off Hunk, which gave him a moment to study the firefight happening on the other side of the planet. The castle-ship didn’t seem to be in imminent danger, but there was an awfully big swarm of fighters around it.

“Okay, scratch Coran off the list,” Lance muttered. “Shiro, Allura, what’s the plan?”

There was no answer, just the sound of heavy breathing and the occasional grunt of either pain or effort.

The Blue Lion slowed. “Shiro?” Lance asked. “Allura?”

The robeast turned on Blue, and before Hunk could call out a warning, it had fired. The concentrated beam of dark light knocked Blue backwards, spinning her end over end, and she drifted away from the battle, her eyes dark.

* * *

Things were going well until they freed the prisoners.

Shiro had paced the room, restless, while Roswell worked, a little silver saucer hovering over the cell controls. Allura had tried briefly to calm him, then given up the effort and focused on reaching out to Black. What had started as desperation had become a matter of pride—Allura had known the lions longer than any of them, had trained with them all. If Lance was able to call his lion, Allura should have been able to do the same.

Or so she said. Of all the paladins, Lance and Shay were the two who had latched onto their lions the fastest, whose bonds ran the deepest. Even Allura agreed on that fact, and Shiro wasn’t entirely sure why it bothered her now.

It didn’t help that he couldn’t get his head out of the past. Images from the Galra prisons danced at the edge of his vision, and old scars ached like they’d never quite healed. He paced to keep the phantom pain from overwhelming him, his eyes riveted on the prisoners sleeping overhead.

He felt like he hadn’t taken a full breath since stumbling into this room. Part of his mind was on the battle in the sky, part on Allura’s continued efforts in the corner, part trying just to ground himself in the present.

All thirty-six cells slid open at once, a viscous liquid sloshing down onto the floor. The canisters themselves were slanted slightly backward, so the prisoners sagged against the wall instead of out into open air, but the sound of pained groans and frightened cries filled the air.

Allura’s eyes snapped open, and she stepped forward, joining Shiro in supporting the nearest prisoners as they stumbled out of their cells.

“You’re okay,” Shiro said, grabbing a prisoner’s arm. It was slick and warm with the viscous liquid, and the prisoner coughed as they tore the breathing mask from their face. Their eyes were screwed shut, their brow furrowed. They were one of a handful of humanoid aliens in the lot, their arms and legs short, their torso disconcertingly long. The fleshy tendrils that covered their head quivered as they drew in one shuddering breath after another. “You’re okay. We’ve got you.”

The branching metal lattice covering their scalp glowed faintly purple, delicate inset veins flaring to life, and the prisoner’s grip tightened on Shiro’s arm. It was his metal arm, and the prisoner’s claws shrieked against the armor, squeezing hard enough that his human arm would have ached from the pressure.

Shiro hesitated, dread trickling down his spine.

The prisoner in the next canister gripped the edge of the opening and whimpered.

All the lights in the room flared suddenly, then went out.

“Allura...” Shiro said, tugging against the first prisoner’s grip. The claws tightened, beginning to crack the armor. He tried to activate his arm, but something within seemed to be fighting him. “Something’s wrong.”

A flash of laserfire lit up the darkness, and Allura cried out in pain.

“Allura!”

She swore under her breath and, a second later, barreled out of the darkness into Shiro. Her Galra eyes glowed faintly in the darkness, and her claws hooked into the seams of his armor. “Come on!”

“What is it?” Shiro demanded, even as he let Allura drag him toward the door, wrenching him free of the prisoner’s hold. Allura began tearing down her barricade.

“The prisoners,” she said, flinging a section of metal pipe over her shoulder. “Their Quintessence--”

Whatever she had planned to say was lost in a sudden clamor as the handful of prisoners who had emerged from their cells charged toward them.

Shiro summoned his shield to block the charge, but it flickered, and someone’s claws caught the gap between his helmet and armor, leaving lines of fire across his chin. Roswell ducked out of the darkness into a narrow beam of light pouring through a hole Allura had made near the top of the barricade.

Roswell’s indicator light, normally a soft blue-white, was now a bright red.

That single fact registered before Roswell opened fire. It didn’t have a strong laser, but Pidge hadn’t wanted to leave their robots entirely undefended. The laser burned itself out against Shiro’s shoulder, the force behind it like a punch. He stumbled, grunting, and smacked his gauntlet to try to get the shield working the way it should.

“Their Quintessence,” Allura said, throwing a sheet of metal the size of a car window at Roswell. The little drone let out a shrill wail as it hit the ground. It didn’t rise. “It’s expanded.”

“What does that even _mean?_ ”

One of the prisoners charged, and Allura abandoned her efforts to escape to grab the prisoner and slam them against the wall. “Either the prisoners are hostile, and they’re turning the machines in this room against us, or both the prisoners and the machines are being controlled by someone else.”

The dread Shiro had been fighting off flared up suddenly, and he took an unintentional step backward, catching a prisoner inches from his chest. “Then...”

She caught his eye and nodded grimly. “We’ll have to leave them.”

Shiro’s gut immediately rebelled against the thought, but he forced the impulse down. The Castle of Lions was home to refugees now, as well as the paladins themselves. They couldn’t bring a threat on board, no matter how much Shiro wanted to save these prisoners.

_Hypocrite._

Haggar’s voice whispered in his ear--a memory or a nightmare. Shiro shuddered, the fingers of his prosthetic arm spasming into a fist.

 _You can’t bring a threat on board the castle-ship?_ the voice asked. It laughed. _And what exactly are_ you _?_

Shiro slammed a door on the voice. He was safe. He was in control. As long as Haggar didn’t get too close to him…

Shiro warred with himself for a moment, then spun, activated his arm—it fought him again, just a little—and cut through the last big metal plate blocking the door. “Let’s go.”

They charged through the hole, not slowing pace at the crowd of Galra and sentries waiting for them. Guilt tugged at Shiro’s heart, but he held fast. Fear for the refugees wasn’t the only reason to pull out. There were thirty-six prisoners in that room—more than enough to overpower two paladins, once they had all woken up. He had no idea how to bring the prisoners back to themselves, if it was possible at all.

And the other paladins needed the Black Lion.

So Shiro ran. The resistance in his arm was gone now, gone along with Haggar’s taunting voice, and he tore through anything that got in his way. The prisoners poured after them, and the sight of them created a panic in the guards.

“The pilots!” someone shouted. “Don’t let the pilots get away!”

For an instant, Shiro thought the voice meant him and Allura, but then the guards turned back toward the prisoners. Some of the sentries who turned froze for an instant, their pink eyeslits turning crimson. Galra soldiers cried out as their own sentries opened fire on them.

Shiro and Allura didn’t stop to see who won the battle. They ran, and Shiro tried to raise the others on the comms—but whatever the prisoners had done to control Roswell and the sentries seemed to be interfering with the tech in their armor, too.

He just hoped it would wear off by the time they reached the Black Lion.

* * *

The battle was not going well. Pidge and Lance were both out of commission, Coran was still thoroughly distracted, and Hunk had his own problems.

Namely, the robeast.

Matt and Keith were doing a good job of distracting it, all things considered, constantly darting in to hit it with attacks that didn’t do any substantial damage. It would turn on them, Matt would swear colorfully in a blend of English and Galran, and they would zip away.

It wasn’t doing anything to _beat_ the dang thing, but it was the only thing keeping Yellow from joining the other lions in their zero-G nap time.

“There’s gotta be a way to stop that thing,” Hunk muttered, trying to line up a shot on the EMP cannon. Not that he hadn’t already shot it several times, and been rewarded with precisely nothing. But there was always the hope that this time would be different.

“Faraday cage?” Matt suggested, a little shrill. “Not exactly a lot you can do on the fly to counter an EMP.”

But it wasn’t an EMP, not exactly. Altean systems—most alien systems for that matter—worked differently than human electronics. Not based on electricity and wires, but on Quintessence. An electromagnetic pulse wouldn’t affect Yellow like this.

“It is almost as though that robeast were draining our lions’ Quintessence,” Shay murmured.

Hunk sat up straight, electrified. “Shay, that’s it!”

“It is…?”

“The main crystal is shielded—life support, too.” Hunk squinted, trying to remember what little he’d managed to figure out about Yellow’s inner workings during his maintenance checks. The crystal and the life support system were directly connected to each other, but they hovered in the middle of an empty pocket in Yellow’s chest, a few millimeters separating it from everything around it. It had confused Hunk the first time he saw it, the fact that no conduit actually connected to the power supply, but even in an idle state, Yellow’s crystal radiated enough energy that Hunk could feel it as a tingle in his fingers.

The open area served as a buffer, and it must have been enough to protect against the robeast’s attack. All the other systems lost power as Quintessence was drawn out of them, and they had to slowly recharge. But life-support, still fully powered, just had to kickstart a few outlying systems—everything except air circulation and temperature regulation was contained in the core.

“I think I know how to beat it,” Hunk whispered.

The comms went silent. Another presence filtered into Hunk’s mind. _Allura._ She seemed to recognize the direction of his thoughts and chilled. Shiro’s mind joined hers, and they filled Hunk with an impulse to hold, to not carry out his plan.

“We’ll be there in a second,” Shiro said, his voice distant and tinny over the comms. “Hunk—don’t. It’s too dangerous.”

“Don’t what?” Matt asked. “If he’s got a plan--”

“No.”

Hunk grit his teeth, shaking off the weight of Shiro and Allura’s hesitation. “I can do this, Shiro.”

“But--”

“I’m an engineer, damn it!” Hunk snapped. “Let me do my job!”

Hunk felt an immediate stab of guilt for his outburst, but Allura’s mind had gone quiet, and Shiro was no longer trying to dissuade him. Shay laid a hand on his shoulder, and when he looked up at her, he could feel her pride welling inside her, warming him like an unexpected patch of sunshine on a cloudy day.

“Go,” she said. “I will fly.”

He nodded, and she slid into the pilot seat as he vacated it. The dashboard rippled, clunks echoing through the cockpit as it assumed the simple configuration Shay used, with only a few screens for diagnostics and a single metal plate to allow her to communicate with Yellow.

As Hunk turned away from the controls, a panel opened up in the floor. He’d expected it to be there, he realized, though he’d never seen it before. Maybe that was Yellow’s doing, promising him she’d always provide a way when he really needed it. She was his lion, and he was her engineer, and after all, he’d always sensed her mind more clearly while fixing her up than while flying her.

The edges of the access hatch glowed faintly yellow in welcome, and Hunk stepped up to the opening, staring down a shaft into the depths of his lion. It really was awfully dark, and awfully small. Hunk wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but he wasn’t sure how much he wanted to go spelunking down the mystery hatch.

“Deeper,” Shay breathed. He turned and found her watching him with steady eyes, and Hunk got the impression she knew what he was thinking. “You must go deeper. Our lion will watch out for you.”

Hunk glanced back at the hatch, then down at his bayard. His eyes slid to Shay’s hands, glowing as she pressed them against the dashboard. “Are you going to be okay up here?”

Shay hesitated, then nodded. “I am a paladin of Voltron. I will do what I must to protect our friends.”

“And all I have to do is make sure you can.” He laughed nervously, and Shay nodded to him. He could feel her hesitation in the gesture, and her faith in him, and he straightened. “Then let’s do it.”

With one last deep breath, Hunk plunged through the hatch, his headlamp illuminating the rungs set into one wall. The ladder descended only ten or twenty feet before it hit a catwalk in a maintenance space large enough to stand in. Narrow passages twisted through the machinery here and there, and more ladders led yet deeper. Hunk recognized the space as the maintenance area he’d entered from the lion’s belly, but he’d never before noticed the ladder to the cockpit.

He put the question aside for now. The robeast seemed to need a few minutes to charge its EMP-like cannon between each use, and it had taken out Blue maybe two minutes ago. He had to work fast.

Yellow’s consciousness was stronger down here, and Hunk thought he could feel Shay’s mind on the other end of the bond, watchful and encouraging. It lent urgency to his motions as he hurried along the catwalk to the crystal, bright and blue. He could sense Quintessence before he got there, and saw the mirage-like shimmer in the air, bridging the gap to the Q-conduit that carried power to the rest of the ship.

Yellow rumbled faintly, and Hunk closed his eyes, pressing a hand to the wall to steady himself. Something tickled the edge of his awareness, like a tiny whisper, distant and unrecognizable. He strained his ears, feeling ridiculous, like Horton listening to the Whos on his tiny little dust speck.

Someone laughed.

The sound was so crystal clear, so bright and close, like wind chimes stirring beside his ear, that he jerked back, eyes flying open. The crystal still bathed him in its warm light, the same light that glowed more faintly inside the Q-conduit all around him.

But there was a new light, soft yellow around his hand, dancing across the machinery like a candle’s flame.

He swore he could hear someone singing.

Before he could think too hard about it, the Yellow Lion roared, the sound reverberating through Hunk’s head. He no longer stood in his own body on a catwalk in the depth of his lion. Instead, he floated. He flowed. Systems flashed through his mind—pistons, shield generator, weapons array, life support. He saw them, and he felt them, and he felt the Quintessence flowing through them.

His mind raced back toward the heart of the lion along lines of shimmering blue, hurtling toward a sudden end. He blinked, and he was at the gap surrounding the main crystal. For one dizzying moment, he existed in a perfect void.

Then he was across the gap, hardly slowing, rushing toward a bright, hot pocket of energy.

His mind reeled with knowledge, with _understanding._ It was like Yellow had slipped in through his ribs and taken up residence inside him, her thunderous purrs showing him how her various systems worked. His hands pressed against smooth metal, and he knew instinctively how this interface worked, how it linked his mind to his pilot’s--

Startled, Hunk opened his eyes and found himself staring out at a million pinpricks of light, their beauty hardly dimmed by the battle raging before him. Lasers flashed, lions danced. Green and Blue still drifted, but the robeast was pulling back, curling in on itself, preparing.

Minds caught on each other, faltered. The heartbeat of an ancient creature pounded inside him, inside _them_ , the rhythm of a song he thought he knew without ever having heard it before.

Shay recovered first, directing Yellow away from one final barrage of lasers as the robeast began to charge its cannon. She thought not in words, but in a song, a song that reverberated throughout Hunk’s body, a song reflected in the machines all around him.

A song, he realized, she’d heard since she was a child. The song of the Balmera.

The song quickened, instilling in Hunk a sense of urgency, and he settled back into his own body, though part of his mind remained above, with Shay. He looked again at the buffer zone around the main crystal, but this time he saw _more_. He saw how the Quintessence bridged the gap in a way the robeast’s attack could not. He saw how far that attack could reach, and how much farther the Quintessence could go before it, too, would falter.

He turned and ran for the engine, his bayard becoming a pair of wire-cutters. The Q-conduit ran along insulated panels, like conductive tracks printed on a circuit board, so they stayed in place as Hunk snipped them, letting Yellow’s instinct tell him how large a gap to leave.

He didn’t stop when he’d finished his buffer around the engine, but quickly shielded the communications array, then sprinted to one of the nearby ladders and dropped down into Yellow’s back left leg to do the same for the thruster here. The main engine would be enough, probably, for basic flight, but the thrusters gave the lion an extra boost of speed and helped with fine maneuvering.

He was just dropping down toward the other thruster when the robeast unfurled. Hunk saw it through Shay’s eyes, felt a twinge of fear.

Then they were moving, and Hunk raced to clip these last few threads, to protect the second thruster, as the robeast took aim at Green, who had only just begun to stir.

Shay urged them faster, and Yellow sang her elation, charging toward the threat, ready to throw herself between her friends and danger. Hunk braced himself just before Yellow headbutted Green out of the path of the incoming laser.

Darkness washed over him.

* * *

Shiro pulled the Black Lion back as Shay took the full force of the robeast’s attack. His heart was in his throat, pounding with mingled hope and dread as Green shook herself, the last few lights flickering on. Pidge started to ask a question, and Allura reached out to soothe them as Shiro watched to see whether Hunk’s plan had worked.

He felt Hunk’s elation an instant before the Yellow Lion came back online, hardly inconvenienced by the attack that had knocked her flat for a solid five minutes before.

Hunk was cheering as the comms came up, and Shay laughed, pushing forward to seize one of the robeast arms in the Yellow Lion’s jaws. The robeast seemed perplexed by the Yellow Lion’s presence there—limping, yes, but far from out of this fight. Before the robeast could recover, the Red Lion was there, breathing fire into its core, and Yellow _pulled_ , twisting the monster as it tried to flee, ensuring Red’s attack hit it dead center.

It still didn’t do much in the way of damage, but that didn’t worry Shiro the way it had when he’d first joined the battle beyond Maorel’s atmosphere. “Steady, everyone. Lance should be coming back online in a few minutes. Once he does, we form Voltron and take this thing out. And Hunk—” Shiro smiled, willing Hunk to feel the pride reverberating through Shiro and Allura’s bond. “Nice work.”

The others voiced their agreement, and Shiro felt Hunk blush, grinning deep within the heart of his lion.

“Coran,” said Allura. “How are you holding up?”

“Nearly finished, Princess,” Coran said. “Had a bit of trouble with their gunships, but I think we’ve got it sorted now.”

“Good.”

Shiro felt her smile, relaxing a little as the tide of battle turned. Yellow’s weapons systems were still offline, but Shay was not shy about using her lion as a battering ram, as a shield thrown in front of the other lions, protecting them so they could harry the robeast unimpeded.

Shiro kept a corner of his mind focused on Lance, restless and anxious inside his healing lion. Lance could tell Blue was nearly recovered, her systems beginning to come back online.

As if sensing that the end was near, the robeast began to charge its cannon one last time. It had hardly been half the interval between previous attacks, and the creature’s actions were tinged with desperation. The energy gathering at its mouth seemed less concentrated than before, and when it fired, Shay was there to take the blast meant for the Blue Lion.

Yellow flickered, her eyes dimming for just an instant.

She came back online with a roar, Blue echoing her a moment later. Shiro and Allura’s minds sank into their bond, reaching out for the rest of the team.

“Now!” Shiro roared. “Form Voltron!”

* * *

Pidge noticed it first, the way the bond seemed louder, closer, more vibrant. They heard the others’ thoughts more clearly than the other times they’d formed Voltron, and wondered if that was the effect of the dual paladins’ bonds.

Allura realized they hadn’t formed Voltron since Matt and Keith had first learned to copilot the Red Lion. Their training time had been taken up, at first, with trying to unlock her bond with Shiro, and then Hunk’s bond with Shay, and it wasn’t long after that they’d plunged head-first into their efforts to unravel the secrets of Shiro’s arm.

(They all felt his guilt as that thought surfaced, cold and dark and small. They answered in quiet solidarity, and Shiro breathed out some small fraction of the tension he’d been carrying.)

It took only until Pidge caught the robeast’s first bludgeoning attack on their shield to feel the difference three new paladins had wrought.

Voltron moved to the rhythm of Shay’s song, a pounding beat that kept them all in time. Hunk sat once more in the cockpit, in a new chair beside Shay’s, but his mind ran the full length of Voltron’s body, monitoring her systems, alert for damage or strain, feeding all this information directly into the other paladins’ minds.

They moved faster, too, the Red Lion’s speed making Voltron more agile than they’d ever been before. They spun around a laser blast, and Lance brought their heel down against the robeast’s skull.

Through it all, Shiro and Allura pulsed loud in the bond. Lance had the feeling that if he turned around, he would find the black paladins standing behind him, hands on his shoulder. An eerie feeling, but not unwelcome. The sentiment resonated in every mind, and in every mind Shiro and Allura smiled. They seemed hardly to exist outside the bond, not merely the head of Voltron, but the very lifeblood, flowing from limb to limb. They didn’t take control of their teammates so much as become a part of them, absorbing all their thoughts, all their ideas, all their observations, and merging them into a single consciousness.

The robeast floundered under the onslaught, growing more panicked as one attack after another failed to land. It turned, fled toward the castle-ship, charging its cannon as it went.

Determination sang in every mind.

A panel opened up in the Red Lion’s cockpit, a familiar recess glowing with crimson light. Keith smiled, Matt summoned his bayard, and the line between them blurred as they plugged it in and _twisted_.

A sword formed in Voltron’s right hand, long and straight and gleaming. The blue and yellow paladins pushed them forward, closing the distance between them and the robeast. The song rose to a crescendo in their bones.

Voltron pivoted. The robeast’s final salvo disappeared into the vast nothingness of space. The sword sliced through its thick armor, cleaving the beast in two.

Then, stillness.

* * *

Coran had just begun to relax when the bad news started rolling in. The local fleet was decimated, Tev picking off the stragglers with the defensive drones, Zelka off seeing to the minor damage the shield generator had sustained after thirty minutes of continuous fire.

That left Coran free to watch Voltron cut down the robeast. Once it was dead, Coran breathed a sigh of relief and Tev, glancing up from his control panel, gave a cheer.

“Excellent work, both of you,” Coran said. Tev grinned and Zelka hummed over the comms, a pleased note in her voice.

“Next time,” she said, “I will be faster.”

Tev rolled his eyes. “Take the compliment, _hava_ ,” he said. Coran smiled at the nickname, one of several Galran terms for grandmother. “We _did_ do a pretty sweet job.”

Coran shook his head, chuckling at the pair, and was about to hail Allura and the other paladins when the first alarm sounded.

Tev’s good humor sobered, and he called up the alert on his screen. “Distress beacon,” he said. “From the Kera sector.”

 _Anamuri._ Coran’s heart clenched. He already had the alert up, but he only made it to the phrase, “massive cybernetic beast,” when a second alarm blared with another distress beacon, this one from Arus and containing a panicked message from the Arusian king.

Coran hailed Voltron, and in the time it took to for Allura to respond, a third and fourth alert had joined the others.

“We have a problem,” Coran said, his stomach tying itself in knots. “Four robeasts have just been launched.”

“What?” Allura demanded. “Where? I don’t see--”

“Not here,” said Coran. His eyes flicked from one window to the next, feeling the weight of Tev’s eyes on him. “Arus, Kera, Merkul, and...” He closed his eyes. “Berlou.”

* * *

It seemed the air had gone out of Shiro’s lungs. Four robeasts. _Four—_ all of them attacking Voltron’s allies, all of them so far from the rest that choosing one could very easily doom the others. The paladins could split up, but it was unlikely any of the robeasts could be handled by a single lion. The odds that all four could be taken out without Voltron were vanishingly small.

Shiro was aware of Allura thinking similar thoughts behind him, of all the paladins’ worry.

They all arrived at the solution at the same moment, and the shock of it pulled Shiro’s mind out of the Voltron bond.

“We need to hit the lab.” It was Allura who spoke, only because Shiro was thinking again of the prisoners. The pilots, as the guards had called them. Innocents caught up in the Galra Empire’s experimentation. He couldn’t seem to remember how to speak.

The others were similarly conflicted, their emotions discordant in the bond. What remained of the bond. Matt was white-hot fury, Shay stark terror.

“What about the prisoners?” Lance said, his voice a deceptive calm overlying a hurricane heart.

Allura hesitated, and Shiro forced himself to fill the silence. “The prisoners are the ones controlling the robeasts. They don’t seem to know what they’re doing, but…”

“So you just want to _kill_ them?” Matt demanded. There was a cutting accusation behind his words, a blow Shiro absorbed. He deserved it, and more. “We’ve been there, Shiro— _we_ were prisoners!”

“I know,” Shiro said, closing his eyes before Matt could say anything more. “I might still end up in their shoes, if Haggar decides to take advantage of the override in my arm before we can find it… I might very well end up in this exact position.” He paused to breathe. This wasn't a choice he wanted to make. This wasn't a choice at all. Millions of lives weighed against thirty-six.

Maybe some day, the lives of his closest friends weighed against Shiro's.

“I would want you to kill me.”

Utter silence answered this declaration, and Shiro instantly regretted his words. Not because they were untrue—he meant them, he absolutely did, and every single one of his teammates could feel that truth—but because of the horror filling the bond. The music had stopped. Walls flew up.

Walls, he realized, that were his own.

He had only a moment to register this before the link failed, and the lions scattered, the other four turning at once toward Black. Shiro sighed, reaching out silently to Allura, who nodded. “We’ll deal with the base,” he said. “The rest of you head back to the castle-ship.”

“But--” Keith began.

Shiro didn’t let him finish. “That’s an order. We’ll be back.”

It was frighteningly easy. Coran and his crew had destroyed nearly all of the aerial defenses in the system. The lab itself had no weapons except the robeasts locked within their hangars. Shiro could hear some of them pounding, the sound reverberating through the canyon, but the Galra hadn’t cut corners on containing their living, breathing superweapons.

Shiro flew low over the canyon where the lab was situated, hesitated for just an instant, and opened fire on the building where he and Allura had found the prisoners. He didn’t stop when the roof collapsed, didn’t stop until the BLIP-tech showed no more vital signs in that building. The robeasts’ vital signs faded, too, dying along with their pilots.

Shiro ignored the watchful eyes felt through Allura’s far-flung mind, firing in steady rhythm until Coran confirmed that the attacking robeasts had also been incapacitated.

When it was done, Shiro muted the mics, Allura stepped away from her controls, and they shared a moment of silence for the lives they’d just ended.

* * *

The problem with pulling a fast one on Commander Vanda, Val was realizing, was there was no end. Every day Vanda had Val dragged out of her cell and flown down to Earth in the dead of the New Mexico night to search for Altean writings in the caverns outside Carlsbad. Every night, Val tried to pretend they were close.

It wasn’t like she could shrug and say, _Whoops. Guess I was wrong._

Vanda’s patience, however, didn’t last forever.

She hadn’t been lying when she said the punishments would get worse with each failure. The first day had been a single blow—painful, but the bruise it left had faded by now.

The second day, Val had received a jab in the small of her back by an electrified wand, like some kind of supercharged alien taser. She’d had to be carried back to the ship like a sack of potatoes, but the numbness had faded after a few hours.

Day three brought a beating that might have cracked one of Val’s ribs; it still hurt when she moved, but Vanda didn’t let her slow in her search for a cache that didn’t exist. (This was the punishment that pushed her hunt for escape over the edge from urgent to raw, mind-consuming desperation. But her plan for getting out of her cell—stick something in the lock and hope—was still tissue-thin, and she hadn’t yet found a pilot. Even if one of the other prisoners _was_ a pilot, would Val be able to get them out?)

On the fourth day, Val blacked out before her punishment was complete. She woke up in solitary, the floor beneath her smeared with her own blood. They left her there until they came for her on the fifth day, dragging her by the hair to the shuttle that would take her back down to within spitting distance of home.

The fifth day, standing in the cockpit, watching blue oceans swell before her, was the first time she considered throwing off the robots holding her arms and making a bid for the controls. Probably she would just end up shot in the head, but maybe she could wipe them all out on the side of a mountain before she died.

She held back, and spent another four hours stumbling around caverns on dead legs, her head too clouded to think up a convincing excuse for her failure. When Vanda called an end to the search, Val tensed, expecting another beating.

Instead, her guards grabbed her arms and towed her back toward the ship without a word. Fear clawed at Val’s throat, along with the knowledge that Vanda wouldn’t simply give up on her punishments. If nothing had come yet, it could only mean something worse was waiting for her above.

She stared longingly at the controls for the duration of the return trip, but found herself rooted in place, unable to make herself act. She didn’t want to die.

They landed, and two guards dragged her to an unfamiliar room in the belly of the ship, empty except for a table outfitted with leather restraints and a metal tray stocked with scalpels, syringes, and more shiny metal instruments Val didn’t recognize.

Val’s gut turned to ice at the sight of it, but the guards flanking her tightened their grips on her arms.

“Your memory seems to be questionable at best, human,” Vanda said from her position behind a pane of glass, overlooking the room. “Let’s see if my researchers can figure out how to… _help_.”

The fear that had kept Val frozen until now became a wild beast, overtaking reason, and she thrashed against her captors’ hold. But they were taller than her, and stronger, and she hadn’t eaten a full meal in over a month. They wrestled her down on the table and secured the restraints around her wrists and ankles, her hips, chest, and forehead.

After that, all she could do was scream.


	14. Machines of Nature

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... While trying to escape from the robeast research facility on the planet Maorel, Shiro and Allura discovered that the robeast pilots have incredibly strong technopathic abilities. Unfortunately, they seemed not to realize where they were or what they were doing, and the team was forced to leave them behind. In orbit, Hunk and Shay synced up, Shay taking over in the cockpit so Hunk could go below and soup up Yellow's defenses, allowing them to thwart the robeast's strongest weapon. The team formed Voltron and defeated the creature--only to receive word of four more robeasts launching attacks against Voltron's allies.
> 
> Shiro and Allura sent the other paladins back to the castle-ship, then destroyed the lab--and the pilots inside.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we get to the chapter, everyone should take a second and go look at [this beautiful Lealle](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/158270172299/lealle-from-squirenonny-s-great-duality) drawn by Pechat (@ seamarmot on Tumblr). I die. She's so beautiful. <3

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #1.2  
>  Dated two years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> The Olkari are well known in civilized space as an extraordinarily technopathic species. Rumor says they can build a ship in minutes with half a dozen masters and a heap of scrap metal. Gross exaggeration, of course, but their abilities are undeniably remarkable.
> 
> It is only natural, then, that we establish a sister lab on Olkarion to study its inhabitants' natural ability. Perhaps by doing so we may find the key to giving our own engineers similar skills.

* * *

_The world was a blur of colors, of shadows passing over the sun. Everything around him swirled like a kaleidoscope, folding in on him, splitting him into pieces and pulling him apart._

_There was no pain, though. That was new._

_"Are you sure he's stable enough for this?"  
_

_Yellow eyes stared out of the shifting shadows, impossibly clear in a world that seemed to only half exist._

_"The boys over in Hovent Sector don't need him alive. As long as his corpse makes it, we've done our duty."_

_A laugh tried to burrow out of him, but the tears were faster, hot and stinging as they slid from the corner of his eyes and pooled in his ears. So this was it. He was dying._

_He tried to tell himself he would fight it, he would find away to escape, to live, to find his father, to avenge the man who'd died for him._

_But he knew._

_There was no escaping the Galra Empire._

_He closed his eyes, and the universe collapsed around him._

* * *

Matt woke in his own bed, nearly as tired as he'd been when he finally fell asleep sometime around three a.m. He hadn't meant to stay up so late, but some corner of his overworked mind had come to associate Shiro's hand on his back as a signal that it was time to sleep.

Shiro had never showed up last night, so Matt hadn't registered the late hour until he was practically passing out on top of Pidge.

When they'd finally shoved him out the door, he'd stumbled back to the hallway where the paladins had their quarters and made it all the way to Shiro's bedroom door before his mind caught up with him. He stood there in the hallway for several long moments, then dragged himself back to his own, cold bed and passed out for... Matt glanced at the clock beside his bed and groaned. Three hours.

Well, he was up now, and the nightmares ensured he wouldn't be finding rest again soon. Best to grab some food and get back to work.

The early hour didn't register to him as anything more than a mild annoyance until he opened the kitchen door and ran directly into Shiro's chest. Shiro stiffened, his spork clattering to the floor, and both of them were too busy staring at each other with mounting horror to care about the new green stain on the floor.

"Matt," Shiro breathed.

The word hit Matt like a slap, and his last, restless thoughts from last night returned to him. Maorel. The battle. The prisoners. Matt remembered yelling, pleading, screaming at the universe to stop punishing the innocent for once.

He wished he could remember what, exactly, he'd said that had hurt Shiro so badly.

"I'm sorry."

The only thing that surprised Matt more than the fact that he'd actually managed to force the words out was the fact that Shiro's apology came a split second faster. Frowning, Matt looked up at Shiro's wide-eyed look of surprise. "What are _you_ apologizing for?" Matt demanded.

Shiro's mouth worked silently for a moment, and he started to gesture before remembering his bowl of food goo. He set it aside, his shoulders riding tense beside his ears. "Yesterday--the prisoners. I'm sorry I couldn't... I couldn't..."

Matt's legs threatened to give out beneath him, and he stumbled forward, catching Shiro's wrists. "You think I blame _you_?"

"I..." Shiro frowned, his gaze focusing on Matt's. " _Yes_. I'm the one who killed them."

"To save lives, Shiro, I--You didn't have a choice!" Matt leaned forward, hesitating only until Shiro relaxed toward him before wrapping his arms around Shiro's waist. "I'm sorry, Takashi," he said. "I was upset about the whole situation. I was mad at Haggar, at _Zarkon_ , for forcing you to make that decision." He tipped his head back, wanting--needing--to look Shiro in the eyes as he said, "It wasn't _you_ I was mad at. _None_ of us blame you."

Pain creased Shiro's face, but he smiled, tightening his hold on Matt. "I'm still sorry."

"I know," Matt said. He closed his eyes and turned his face into the crook of Shiro's neck. "I know."

* * *

Pidge removed their glasses to rub their eyes and let out a groan.

“Tired already?” Matt asked dryly. “We’ve only been here for four hours.”

Pidge shot him a dirty look, settled their glasses back on their nose, and reached a hand out toward their laptop. Slumped in their chair as they were, they couldn’t quite reach, but they strained for a moment before giving up and letting their arm fall limp at their side. They could have sat up, sure, but it sounded like too much work at the moment.

“There’s _nothing_ ,” Pidge said. It had been five days since Maorel, five long days of pure, concentrated frustration. “I’ve been through this code a million times, and I can’t find any reference to a tracking program or an override switch or _anything_.”

Hunk, curled up on the floor beside Matt and flipping through holographic projections of Shiro’s arm, gave Pidge a sympathetic grimace. “That complicated, huh?”

“ _No_." They paused, huffed. "Kinda.” Pidge refused to pout, but they crossed their arms and glared at their laptop. “I mean, yeah, it’s complicated. Not surprising, considering it’s an alien arm that moves exactly like a real one and, oh yeah! Also turns into a glowy purple hand of death.” They swung their hand like an axe blade, sighed, and rolled their head toward Matt and Hunk. “But it’s more than that.”

Matt clicked a button on his handheld projector, switching from a view of the arm’s skeletal system to a network of tiny canals and bulbous sacks that looked like the inside of a lung, or like an ant colony. “What do you mean?”

Pidge let their head loll over their seat back, staring at the ceiling of Matt and Hunk’s work room. It was weird to not be working in Green’s hangar, but Pidge had spent the better part of two weeks in there, pulling their hair out over the Galra code in Shiro’s arm and, more recently, trying to decode the research logs they’d pulled from the lab on Maorel. The files were encrypted using a cypher Keith didn’t recognize, so it had taken some time to crack. Pidge had used the first entry as a litmus test, trying out different decryption programs until they found one that produced actual words.

But now the program was running, decoding the rest of the logs, and Pidge had several hours to burn while it worked.

They’d almost rather be staring at half-decrypted Galran research logs. That would have made more sense than _this_.

“I can do complicated,” they said, more spiteful than they probably had a right to be. But they were tired, and Shiro had been quiet and distracted since the battle on Maorel, and Pidge just wanted to make some real, solid progress for once. “I may not understand all the fine details of this code yet, but I’m getting there—and all it’s telling me is that there are pieces missing.”

Matt set down the schematics. “Missing?”

“Yeah.” Pidge swept a hand toward their laptop, grimacing as the headache they’d been fighting off all day made itself known again. “This code makes references to other processes that just… aren’t _here_. It’s like it’s linked up to a server somewhere, except that we’ve already checked and it’s not transmitting anything the castle can pick up.”

“What if it’s not a server?” Hunk asked. He was frowning, but it was a thoughtful frown—someone trying to work out a tricky puzzle, rather than someone about to stab their computer with their bayard so they didn’t have to stare at the Swiss cheese code in Shiro’s arm. “What if there’s another set of code in the arm itself?”

Pidge gave him a flat look. “Another set of code.”

Hunk nodded, then seemed to realize that both the Holts were staring at him blankly. He flushed. “Look at these schematics,” he said, waving his projector toward Pidge. He was propped up on one elbow now, though he still looked like he’d rather be sleeping.

Had _any_ of them been sleeping enough lately? Pidge had stopped counting the hours of sleep they got because the total was thoroughly depressing, and it seemed they could always find Hunk or Matt or both hard at work, no matter the hour.

Hunk yawned now, but kept waving the mini projector. “There’s an awful lot of organic stuff in here for a super advanced mechanical limb.”

“No kidding.” Matt’s projector now rested on his crossed legs, and he prodded at the controls to flip from image to image. “Synthetic nerves, some kind of circulatory system for Quintessence, whatever _these_ are.” He gestured curtly at the ant colony lookalike. “If I knew more about intergalactic biology this might make more sense.”

“But that’s just it—there’s a whole layer of information here we can’t translate.” Hunk pushed himself up and stumbled over to Pidge’s chair. He’d hardly moved since the three of them started their marathon think-tank session, and he shook his legs out like they’d fallen asleep without the rest of him. “What if pieces of code are missing because they’re contained in the Quintessence?”

Pidge frowned at him, then at the screen. “Quintessence is basically the power source, right? It’s like a slightly more magical version of electricity. It can transmit data, but the Quintessence itself isn’t a storage medium.”

“Are you sure about that?” Hunk asked, holding up his hands as Pidge turned to scowl at him. “Think about it. Quintessence is everywhere—it’s a power source, yeah, but it’s also some weird life force, and a weapon, and it somehow stores memories for the memory profiles. It fills the same role as electricity does, but it doesn’t work the same way. I’d call it magic, but I think it might just be that we don’t understand the science behind it.”

Pidge let out an exasperated groan. “I am _not_ dealing with magic code, Hunk. Code is code. If it’s magic, it’s not code. Why don’t we have Coran deal with the mystical BS?”

Matt hummed thoughtfully. “Maybe it’s _not_ electricity. Maybe it’s more like blood.”

“Blood?” Pidge twisted in their chair to stare at him. “Now you’re just getting creepy.”

“I mean it.” Matt stood, switching his projector to a different image and setting it on the table next to Pidge’s laptop. “There’s a circulatory system here, like arteries and veins, but all it carries is Quintessence. Blood transports all kind of things, right? What if this arm is controlled partly by code and partly by some kind of... Quintessential hormone system?”

“I make it a rule not to pay attention to hormones,” Pidge said. “Also, aren’t they notoriously difficult to figure out? Like, get the whole world to work on this and maybe we’ll have half of it figured out ten years from now?”

Matt grunted. “I’m not saying this makes it any _easier_.”

“Also, if Haggar designed this thing, it’s bound to be _way_ simpler than the human endocrine system,” Hunk pointed out. “Right? I mean, she’d have to design every signaling pathway individually, and build in receptors, and… It’s not like she’s been working on this for forever. There’s only so much she would have had time for.”

“Unless she lifted the system from some other organism,” Matt argued. “Hell, for all we know the arm uses some kind of psychic receptor Haggar ripped out of another prisoner.”

Pidge ran a hand down their face. “So basically, we know nothing and this is never going to work.”

Hunk hesitated, tapping his toes against the ground. “Well, Matt and I found the main override. We could just shut it down.”

 _For all the good that does us,_ Pidge thought. They didn’t bother to say it aloud—Hunk clearly knew that it was a temporary solution at best. Pidge had found a couple points in the code they could gunk up to disable the whole system, too, but that would leave Shiro with only one functioning arm. He could adapt, given time, but Zarkon wouldn’t wait for him to recover.

Besides, who could say whether shutting down the arm, even cutting power to it, would disable the tracker or the override? They were assuming both systems were integrated into the rest of the circuitry, but maybe Hunk was right. Maybe it was all magic.

They lapsed into silence, Matt’s projector slowly rotating the image of the circulatory system, Pidge’s laptop going dark as it switched to power-save mode.

Voices in the hallway dragged Pidge’s mind off the unsolvable problem of Shiro’s arm.

“It’s pretty empty up here. Lots of workrooms, mostly. I think Matt’s got a space staked out, but you could easily find somewhere and turn it into a reading room.”

“Is that Keith?” Hunk asked, already headed for the door. He leaned out into the hallways just as a girl’s voice piped up.

“I’ll bet Bee would love it up here. It’s like a bunker full of busted tech.”

Keith grunted. “Bee… Scrawny girl with the dark patch between her ears? Oh, hey, Hunk.”

Hunk grinned, waving Keith over. “Hey. Who’s your friend?”

“Zuza,” said the girl’s voice. “Me and Keith grew up together.”

Keith snorted, scowling as he walked in. He nodded to Matt, arched an eyebrow at Pidge, then turned back to the tall, burly, furless Galra behind him. “We met when we were eight. You got exiled, what? Two years later? I barely even knew you.”

“That’s because you were an antisocial little runt and I was too busy reading the forbidden histories to make friends.” Zuza grinned, rocking back on her heels. “Admit it, Kiki, you like me.”

“Kiki?” Pidge asked, fighting down a grin.

Keith fixed them with a squint-eyed look, like he was trying to decide whether complaining would make Pidge more or less likely to adopt the (hilarious) nickname. “Zuza’s been trying out nicknames all day. Please don’t encourage her.”

Pouting, Zuza draped herself over Keith’s shoulders. Considering she was a good eight inches taller than him and probably fifty pounds heavier, the effect was something like a purple-striped komodo dragon flopping over a fluffy duckling.

Pidge doubted Keith would appreciate the comparison.

“So what are you lovely folks up to?” Zuza asked, grinning around at them as Keith tried to squirm out from under her. “Ooh, are you the nerds K-fluff told me about?”

Matt crossed his arms and frowned at Keith, the effect ruined somewhat by the laughter that tried to bubble out from him at the name _K-fluff_. “Nerds?” he asked. “Really, Keith?”

Keith wilted a little, and Zuza leaned more heavily on his head. He rolled his eyes and jabbed his elbow backwards into her side. With a yelp, she backed off, and Keith combed his hair flat as he glared back at her. “She wanted to read through the histories. For fun. I said she’d get along great with you.”

“And he called you nerds.”

Which, Pidge had to admit, was a true statement. Still, they couldn’t resist giving Keith a hard time. “Hey, Zuza, have you met Lance yet?”

“Sure. He helps out with the little fluffballs sometimes. Why?”

Pidge grinned straight at Keith as they said, “You seem like the sort of person who’d appreciate his never-ending list of Keith nicknames.”

“Pidge!” Keith cried, shooting Zuza a wary look. “I told you _not_ to encourage her.”

“Yeah, well.” Matt rested an elbow on Zuza’s shoulder—difficult considering he was no taller than Keith—and flashed a smile. “Us nerds have to stick together.”

Zuza chuckled, Keith groaned, and Hunk patted him on the back on the way back to the mound of pillows in the corner.

Keith sighed, dropping into the chair across the table from Pidge. “ _So_ , what are you working on?”

It was possibly the least-subtle change of subject ever, but it killed the mood in the room. Sighing, Matt took the seat beside Keith and pulled his mini projector over, switching back to an exterior view of the arm.

Keith’s face fell. “I take it there’s no good news.”

“Not unless you know anything about magical code and/or hormones,” Matt said with a thin smile.

Keith frowned. “What?”

“The code I have is incomplete,” Pidge explained. “I’m thinking external server, but Hunk voted magic programming and Matt thinks there are hormones in the Quintessence.”

Keith was already shaking his head. “I wouldn't know anything about that. Soldiers don’t need to learn about druidic magic or… Quintessence hormones.” He glanced at Zuza, who shrugged.

“Sounds like those old stories about the Olkari's crazy experiments.”

“The Olkari?” Pidge asked, crossing their arms on the table, wondering why the name sounded so familiar. It was getting progressively harder to keep their eyes open, but they refused to sleep. Not until they’d figured this out. “That some kind of weird splinter group of druids?”

Zuza shook her head. “The Olkari are some of the universe’s greatest engineers. Even Zarkon knows better than to mess with them.”

“He _did_ ,” Keith said, and shrugged when Zuza frowned. “They finally invaded a few years ago. Olkarion is still mostly independent, but there are enough forces in the area to deter a rebellion. Zarkon has the Olkari make weapons for him every now and then in exchange for their ‘freedom.’”

That was it. The logs from Maorel had mentioned Olkari engineers.

Zuza wrinkled her nose. “And there’s no way _that_ could backfire on him.”

Keith grinned.

“Point is.” Zuza turned back to Pidge, crossing her arms and drumming her claws against her arm. “The Olkari like to blend tech with squishy stuff. If anyone knows about techy tricks involving Quintessence, it’s gonna be them.”

Hunk yawned. “So… we’re gonna make a run on an occupied planet for a consultation?”

Pidge glanced at Matt, who shrugged. “Sounds about par for the course with us,” he said. “Let’s go talk to Allura.”

* * *

_...And you want to go there. To an occupied world filled with highly skilled engineers, who Zarkon is sure to be watching closely._

Shiro's words appeared on the screen at Hunk’s bridge station, which might have made the sarcasm less apparent—except of course that Shiro was sitting at his own station just a few feet away, eyebrow expertly quirked. Allura sat on the arm of his seat, staring at the floor. The rest of the paladins were ranged around the room, Shay’s hand on Hunk’s shoulder, Keith draped over the back of Matt’s seat, Coran hovering near Pidge. Zuza was with Lance, whispering back and forth and laughing every now and again, which drew irritated scowls from Keith.

At Shiro and Allura’s direction, they were carrying out this entire discussion by text. They'd never figured out how the Galra had known about the attempt to rescue Jost from the prison ship--it couldn't have been the tracking device, as Shiro had never gone there--but suddenly Shiro was convinced Zarkon was listening in on his conversations. _We could be wrong,_ he'd said, _but at this point we need to look into every possibility._

Ordinarly, Hunk was all for caution, but this seemed like overkill. It wasn’t just that he didn’t buy the bugged arm bit—though he _didn’t_ , there was no mic or anything on the scans and, sure, magic was always an option, but that still left the question of how a puddle of energy encased in steel could _hear_ conversations. But okay. It seemed like they kept stumbling onto new pitfalls Haggar had built into her prosthetic, so Hunk might have allowed for the possibility that she had some weird scrying spell worked into the less mundane systems.

The problem was that Shiro’s solution to this potential problem was to carry on the rest of the war without ever talking about their battle plans, rather than going to Olkarion for help.

 _Zarkon will know we’re there,_ Shiro typed, the motion of his fingers an angry punctuation to his words. _Even if we get out before reinforcements arrive, we’ll be putting the Olkari in danger._

“So we fight,” Keith shot back. Shiro frowned at him, and he groaned, nudging Matt.

 _So we fight,_ Matt typed obligingly. _If the Olkari can help us root out Haggar’s back doors, it’ll be more than worth it._

 _Or,_ Hunk added, _we go in quiet. You stay back on the other side of a wormhole, me, Pidge, and Matt go down to confer with the Olkari, get our answers, maybe bring one of them back with us if we can do it without tipping off the Galra._

 _It’s too risky,_ Shiro said. Allura hummed, and he looked up at her, ready for a fight. She just shook her head, though, then went to the main bridge controls and pulled up the long-range scanners. A few swipes sent the images to each of the paladins’ stations.

 _Olkarion is heavily occupied._ Allura’s words appeared on the screen without her actually typing them, and Hunk wondered if any of them could do that. It might help Keith, who had spent the entire meeting on the receiving end of Shiro’s glares as he tried to join the conversation. Matt had offered to switch places with him, but everyone knew he’d be just as bad as Keith. The two of them had been the most vocal in opposing Shiro’s call for caution.

There was a new layer of ice around Shiro these days, a barrier no one but Allura and Matt were allowed to pass through, and it seemed to be putting Keith on edge more than usual. And, of course, what put Keith on edge put Matt on edge. Every interaction between Keith and Shiro was charged with... It wasn't a grudge, not really, just awkwardness. Tension. Like Keith could see something no one else could, something Shiro either didn't recognize or didn't want to admit, and it had driven a wedge between them. No one wanted to get in the middle of it, either, so it just sort of festered there. Glaringly obvious but ignored by silent agreement.

 _We can get past that,_ Pidge said. Their hands moved quickly across their screen, sifting through the information. _Green and Red are small and fast. With the cloaks, there’s no way the army will notice us. And look—the BLIP-tech scans show pockets of Olkari outside the cities, but hardly any Galra. It must be some kind of resistance or something._

Shiro and Allura stared at each other for a long moment. Allura had so far stayed out of the discussion, though Hunk could tell she didn’t fully agree with Shiro’s points. They were all eager to help Shiro—it was just that Shiro didn’t want anyone risking themself for his sake. His words from Maorel hung over them all like a brewing storm.

_I'd want you to kill me._

Bad enough that he felt that way, Hunk thought. But he didn't have to go and back them all into that corner. If they could give Haggar the boot before she took control, none of them would have to make that awful decision. As far as Hunk was concerned, thwarting Haggar as soon as possible was worth any risk.

Shiro didn't agree. He seemed to realize he wasn’t winning the argument, though, for his shoulders slumped.

 _Fine,_ he typed. _But be careful._

* * *

Akira felt an inexplicable surge of fear as he stared into the lens of Eli’s camera.

He knew it was ridiculous. He’d been at the front of a classroom dozens of times by now, and even before that he’d made a habit of turning himself into a spectacle. (He used to say it was because Takashi was such a bright, shining star Akira had to be a human disco ball to get attention, but the truth was he just liked surprising people.)

Besides, Eli had assured him they could do as many takes as they needed to. Akira should just tell his story straight through, then go back to re-record any pieces he wasn’t happy with. The power of editing, Eli said, could turn a babbling toddler into a poet. Akira had nothing to worry about.

But he was still nervous.

It was a strange, alien feeling, and he squirmed as Eli adjusted the lights and checked the camera. Akira had been composing his speech in his head since he got shot, and so far he hadn’t come up with anything that sounded particularly moving. Then again, _Iverson killed my brother and tried to have me shot_ had a pretty big impact no matter how you phrased it.

“Is this gonna happen sometime soon, or should I run out and get us lunch?” Naomi asked, leaning on the kitchen door.

Eli laughed at the question, though Akira didn’t find it particularly funny. He wasn’t even certain what Naomi was doing here, besides commentating on how long Eli was taking. Did Karen know she was here? Not likely, seeing as Akira and Eli had both been surprised when she showed up, strolling through the front door like she owned the place.

“Lunch sounds good,” Akira said, struggling for a neutral tone. He was grateful to Naomi for saving his life—honestly he was. But he didn’t know her, he didn’t trust her, and he couldn’t help the sliver of irritation that niggled his mind whenever he thought of the mysterious blue ship that had supposedly been seen over the desert. “Take your time.”

Naomi stuck her tongue out at him, as though she were fifteen instead of thirty-something. “As if I’m gonna miss you trying to be _inspiring_.”

Akira sighed.

“Don’t worry about her, Akira,” Eli said in an undertone. “You know she means well.”

“Do I know that?” Akira asked. “Do I really?”

Eli chuckled, twitched the big white umbrella-looking thing that somehow helped with the lighting, and settled in behind his camera. “Well now you’re just sulking.”

It sounded so much like something Takashi would have said that Akira almost responded with an automatic, _Your face is sulking_ , before he remembered that this was not his brother. He closed his eyes, ignored Naomi’s call of, “I _believe_ in you, Kira!” and tried to remember what it was he wanted to say.

“Ready?” Eli asked.

Akira took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and nodded. Eli pushed record, waited the length of three rapid-fire heartbeats, then pointed at Akira to start talking.

“My name is Akira Shirogane,” Akira said. Somehow he managed to keep his voice sounding normal, though he had to flatten his hands against his knees to keep them from shaking. “You might know me as the brother of Takashi Shirogane, the pilot on the Kerberos mission. Until a few days ago, I worked at the Garrison as a flight instructor. I'm sure by now you've heard the official story for my sudden departure--breach of contract, failure to perform to Garrison standards...”

He paused, gave a crooked smile. “You probably didn't hear that Iverson tried to have me shot.”

Naomi’s grin was wider than Akira thought it should be, considering the topic of conversation, but she flashed him a thumbs-up and despite it all Akira found himself relaxing. He pulled the collar of his shirt aside to show his stitches. (Naomi, apparently, had studied field medicine, and she had remarkably steady hands.) Akira had just cleaned the wound, but had left the bandage off for the camera's benefit.

“I’ve been working with Karen Holt, trying to help her find out what happened to her kid. Maybe that makes me a traitor, I don’t know. Commander Iverson certainly thinks so. Me? I just want to know why three cadets wound up dead in the desert in the middle of the night. Iverson can shout about training exercises until he’s blue in the face—but I worked there, so I know for a fact that none of the other cadets were sent on these so-called training runs.

“You know the most ironic part of this? I didn’t even find all that much we could have used against the Garrison until Val went missing. She was the one who knew how to ask questions and dig for answers. I was just there to listen to the chatter. To point the cadets’ families in the right direction. Then Val came to talk to Iverson, and she disappeared. She always carried a digital recorder with her—tool of the trade, she said. She wanted to have the whole interview word for word in case she had to go back to it. I found it—the recorder. It was smashed, and someone had tried to clean it up, but they missed a piece.

“That was a month ago.”

Akira had to stop here, his voice failing him. It had been a month since Val went missing. A month of no word, no hints to her whereabouts. Eli’s face was a mask of sympathy, a tug at the emotions Akira was trying to keep at bay.

He looked instead at Naomi, who was frowning, her eyes sharp and focused. How much of this did she already know? She said she’d been watching him, listening to the talk going around Iverson’s inner circle. (How she’d found out about this inner circle remained a mystery, of course.) But she got dodgy whenever he pressed for details. Had she known about Val? Did she know what Iverson had done with her?

If she did, she wasn’t telling.

Akira returned his gaze to the camera. “I’ve spent the last month trying to find out what really happened to Val, but Iverson keeps his secrets locked up tight. He knew Karen had help inside the Garrison—I guess it's not surprising he found out it was me. Karen and I got to know each other after the Kerberos mission. She lost her husband and son, I lost my brother… We helped each other out.

“I can only assume Iverson was trying to find proof that I’d broken some regulation,” he went on. Naomi had asked him not to talk about her in this video, or imply in any way he had a friend in Iverson's inner circle. Akira hadn't planned on saying anything, anyway. He knew what Iverson did to moles in the Garrison.

Akira shrugged. “Iverson wanted me out of his hair, and when he couldn’t find a legitimate excuse to fire me, he tried to shut me up for good. Two soldiers in stealth gear came to my room at three o’clock in the morning on October fourth. Fortunately I was already awake and was able to escape.

“But the fact that I scared someone enough to want me dead tells me there are _nasty_ secrets hiding behind closed doors.”

That was as far as Akira’s planning went, but now that he was here he had a sudden vision of his students taking it on themselves to continue Akira’s stealth mission.

He leaned forward before Eli could stop the recording. “One more thing,” he said. “Because I know my students, and I know that some of you are going to watch this and get an idea in your head that you need to help out and sneak around digging up all Iverson’s secrets.”

He paused, putting on his best teacher face.

“Don’t.”

Naomi actually laughed at that, soft and surprised. Eli shot her a look and she covered her mouth as she ducked into the kitchen.

Akira, thankfully, had a lot of practice keeping a stern face. “Your classmates may well have been killed for finding out something they shouldn’t have. Please. Don’t put yourselves in that position. Don’t go looking for answers. We’ll handle that part.”

* * *

Pidge had initially been excited about the trip to Olkarion, Galra occupation not withstanding. An entire planet full of tech geniuses—people who could supposedly build any machine they could imagine with a wave of their hand. What self-respecting computer whiz wouldn’t geek out over that?

Then they’d remembered they were heading into the middle of a forest on the far side of a mountain range from the main city, which spanned a good twenty percent of the globe. Never mind towering skyscrapers, sleek tech, computers everywhere you turned.

No, instead, Pidge was headed into a muddy, mosquito-infested wilderness to talk shop with the locals while hoping they didn’t accidentally step in poison ivy.

“At least there are trees, right?” Hunk asked. “So you don’t need to worry about sunburn?”

Pidge glowered at him, and he held up his hands in surrender. Hunk was riding with Pidge in Green while Matt and Keith took Red down. Shiro insisted on having at least two lions present, even if this wasn’t supposed to get messy. The far side of a wormhole was too far for backup in an emergency, so Keith was stuck with the nerds on the trip to the nerd village.

Ironically, Keith was the only one who seemed genuinely excited to be heading to nowheresville instead of the beautiful, modern city visible on the horizon.

“I grew up on floating heaps of metal packed with too many soldiers to hear myself think,” Keith explained when Pidge accused him of being too chipper. “It’ll be nice to spend some time somewhere quiet.”

Pidge curled their lip and scanned the terrain for signs of the Olkari. The BLIP-tech pointed to concentrated vital signs in the area, but there was so much _life_ around the scanners couldn't pinpoint anything, and the canopy was too dense to see through.

So of course it was at this point that arrows streaked up from the trees, whistling past the Green Lion. Pidge wasn’t sure what was more offensive—the fact that the archers apparently didn’t care about the perfectly good cloaks still up around the lions, or the fact that they were freaking _archers_.

The arrows were so small and light Pidge couldn’t tell whether any of them hit their target, but a moment later a shudder ran through Green’s mind. She growled in confusion, then stilled. For an instant Pidge thought they heard voices coming from somewhere far off.

Then Green turned, ignoring Pidge’s guidance, and headed down into the forest.

“What the--?”

Green rumbled, sending images of pastel aliens with bug eyes and fleshy antennae into Pidge’s mind.

Pidge fell silent. “I think we found the Olkari,” they muttered.

Hunk, hunching over the back of their chair, met their eyes. “Makes sense, I guess. Not like the Galra are gonna use arrows.” He didn’t sound convinced.

“Everyone stay alert.” Matt’s voice was tense, and Pidge still couldn’t help the moment of confusion that always came when they remembered Matt was the leader for the day. It wasn’t that they didn’t trust him; he’d just always made a point of avoiding leadership roles, and every time Shiro and Allura put him in charge Pidge had to wonder why Matt didn’t refuse.

They supposed love made people do silly things sometimes. Or Matt was just terrible at saying no.

The lions landed gently in a small clearing. The canopy seemed to fold in behind them, and Pidge thought they spotted the iridescent glint of a particle barrier between the leaves. But where were they hiding the generator?

The leader of the Olkari stepped forward, blue-green eyes widening. It made for an impressive expression, since the eyes already took up a good third of her face, framed by wrinkles and deep shadows. She tipped her head back as the lions dropped their shields—Pidge hadn’t done that, and from Matt’s indignant squawk, neither had he.

But Green just put out a soothing rumble, then lowered her head to the ground.

Pidge frowned, then glanced at Hunk. “I… guess we’re going out now.”

They emerged into the weird green half-light of deep forest. The shadows around them were cool, but the air was thick with humidity that made the atmosphere feel oppressive. Leaves crunched underfoot, and Pidge resisted the urge to swat at imagined gnats and mosquitos.

God, they hated nature.

“Are you them?” asked the Olkari leader, her voice full of awe. It had the same scratchy-soft quality as Pidge’s grandmother, the sort of thing Pidge always associated with cookies fresh from the oven and stories about playing with jacks and listening to old radio shows and something-something family values, blah, blah, blah.

Matt’s steps slowed as he neared the Olkari, and he frowned. “Are we who?”

“The paladins of Voltron. We heard that the lions had returned.” She turned her eyes back to Green and Red. “They are even more impressive than I imagined.”

Matt rubbed the back of his neck, shrugging. “That’s us. Are… you in charge here?”

“I am, at least for now. My name is Ryner. I am the Eldest of this cell. I lead in King Lubos’s stead.”

Matt nodded. “Matt Holt.” He held out his hand, and Ryner shook it, somewhat perplexed by the gesture. “Can we go somewhere to talk? This might take a while.”

“Of course,” said Ryner. “This way.”

* * *

“Fascinating,” said Ryner, leaning forward to peer at the larger-than-life schematics. Matt had brought the little pocket-projector, but Ryner had put on a glowing wooden headset and in the time it took her to walk beneath the outstretched branches of a squat, vine-convered tree, her fingers trailing through the leaves, there was a larger replica of the Altean projector dangling like an apple where she could reach up and grab it.

Matt sat across the table from Ryner—if it could be called a table. It seemed to Pidge to be a slab of rock that had fallen in just the right way, completely by accident. Matt had Ryner's strange headset in his hands and was frowning at it, running his hands over the glowing vein. “What’s fascinating?” he asked, distracted.

Ryner gestured at the projection. “This technology. It is not ours, but it follows similar principles, like the one who built it was trying to emulate our techniques.”

“Can you do that?” Pidge asked. “Can someone else learn to make stuff like you do?”

Pidge knew they were here to ask about Shiro’s arm, of course. That was the priority. But they couldn’t help but get a little bit distracted by the Olkari village. Everywhere they looked, Olkari were using those wooden headsets and similarly glowing metal gauntlets to make guns and energy shields and vehicles and a million other things. From what Pidge could see, most of the machines started out as pods dangling from trees and other plants like some kind of grow-your-own-laser-gun kit.

A few people, like Ryner, seemed to be able to make anything they wanted, even without a pod. And if all this was possible out here in the middle of nowhere with such inferior materials… how awesome would the city be?

Ryner smiled at Pidge’s question. “Our headsets amplify our gifts, allowing us to deliver more complicated commands. They would grant you a small amount of control, although it takes some practice to do more than simply deploy a pod.”

“Deploy a… You mean those pre-made things in the trees?”

“Can this wait, Pidge?” Keith asked. He was the only one not sitting at the table, and he’d spent most of the conversation so far zoning out, his back against a tree, his eyes roving the forest around them. He was frowning now, though. “We’re here for _Shiro_.”

“I know.” Pidge crossed their arms and hunched over the stone table.

Ryner’s large eyes crinkled in a smile, and she leaned toward Pidge and stage whispered, “I’ll show you later.”

Pidge grinned.

“Okay, so...” Hunk gestured at the schematics. “You said it looks like someone was trying to copy you. Does that mean you can figure out how this thing works?”

“I’m afraid it’s not that simple.” Ryner stood and went to a nearby bush. She caressed a branch and two egg-shaped pods grew from the tip, one after another. She plucked them both, then returned to the table and set them down. “Toys,” she explained. “We grow them for our children.”

Ryner tapped the egg on the left and it sprouted legs and began to scuttle across the stone like a drunken spider. Another tap on the other caused it to sprout wings and take off, a little wooden bumblebee.

“I employed the same basic prinicples in crafting both of these toys. They even look similar at a glance. But the mechanisms are completely different. So it is with this arm.” She nodded at the schematics. “Whoever built it was inspired by our work, perhaps even studied it. But the design is original. I will need some time to examine it if I want to discover anything of use.”

“How much time?” Keith asked. “We’re kind of in a hurry here.”

“What he _means,”_ Hunk said, glaring pointedly at Keith, who huffed and looked away, “is the longer we’re here, the more likely the Galra are to notice. We don’t want to put your people in danger.”

But Ryner just waved her hand. “The Galra think that only a handful of us escaped the city, and that we spend our every waking minute foraging so we don’t starve. You don’t need to worry about them noticing your lions.”

She deactivated the projection, then nodded at one of the armed Olkari standing guard at the edge of this little clearing. He saluted and jogged off, leaf-gun-thing at his side. (Seriously, how did they _do_ that? What sort of trees were these, if their leaves didn’t turn to ash the first time one of those guns fired?)

“Come,” Ryner staid, standing. “As long as I’m going to be busy studying this device, I might as well introduce you to our Grove.”

* * *

The Grove, Pidge soon learned, was just about the coolest thing ever produced by nature. This was, of course, because it wasn’t entirely _natural_. It was trees and shrubs and flowers and junk, sure, but it was all engineered.

All Olkari were technopaths, Ryner explained, but that didn’t make them all equally skilled. Especially after the Galra had invaded a few years back, and the refugees had been forced to adapt to life in the wilderness. It was difficult to build machines out of organic matter (Pidge could have told them _that_ ), but a few of the best engineers had managed it.

That was where the headsets had come from. They helped translate the Olkari’s technopathic language to the “language of the trees,” which sounded like total BS to Pidge but apparently made perfect sense to the Olkari. What was theoretically possible without the headsets was infinitely easier _with_ them, so the Olkari used them for all the heavy-lifting.

Once they had the amplifiers, some of their specialists (botanists, Pidge assumed, though Matt whispered _biomechanical engineer_ with a look of absolute delight) had started modifying plants to contain all the instructions needed to build a specific machine. The modified plants were collected in the Grove, and all it took was a single command to trigger the construction process. It was so simple that most Olkari didn't even need the headset to "deploy a pod."

“We can still build things from ordinary plants, of course,” Ryner said, smiling at the Olkari guard, who had returned with four more wooden headsets. “But it is more difficult.”

“I’ll bet,” said Pidge, shoving the headset on their head as soon as Ryner handed it over. “After working with _real_ tech for so long, it’s gotta be hard to switch over to something like this.”

Ryner chuckled. “You’ve got it backwards. Metal is very difficult to work. These trees are much more accomodating.”

Pidge wrinkled their nose. “Well, _sure,_ but that’s just because wood’s so… _soft_.”

“Metal is inert,” Ryner said. “Working it requires a considerable amount of improvisation. When we use plants as our base, on the other hand...” She pressed her palm to the trunk of a small, slender tree nearby. A twig curled away from the main branch, contorted, then flew off in the form of a dragonfly. “Nature is already a machine—and it’s always easier to re-purpose an existing machine than to build one from scratch.”

“Easier isn’t the same thing as _better_ ,” Pidge muttered, which only made Ryner laugh. Pidge didn’t get it. Sure, it was easier to make a bow and arrow than a gun, but a bow was never going to have the strength of a gun, no matter how much you modified it. Metal and plastic were objectively superior materials.

Maybe this was just some kind of cultural optimism. _We don’t have metal anymore, but look on the bright side! We can take short cuts out here!_

Pidge didn’t have long to dwell on the problem of Ryner’s bizarre ideas about craftsmanship, though. Once everyone had a headset, Ryner gave them a crash course in nature modding and left them to play around in the Grove while she went back to examining Shiro’s arm.

Unfortunately, Ryner’s instructions didn’t make a whole lot of sense. Too much _talk to the tree_ and _focus on growth_ and crap like that. Matt had sat down cross-legged in front of the tallest tree and was muttering to himself about temperature and daylight and signaling. (“Pidge, if we ever come out of a wormhole ten years in the past, remind me to tell myself to pay more attention to the plant unit.”)

Hunk had his ear pressed against the trunk of another tree and was knocking softly, like he was trying to find a hollow spot.

A few feet away, Keith tapped his chin with one claw and seemed to be trying to glare his shrub into submission. After a moment, he reached out and tentatively poked a leaf. Nothing happened.

Pidge backed up, staring at the pods visible in some of the trees. They ranged from fingernail-sized to as big as a grizzly, dozens of half-made machines just waiting to be deployed. Ryner had said the point of the Grove was to make things easier—so didn’t that mean all they had to do was flip a switch or something?

Cautiously, Pidge pressed their hand against the trunk of a tree with medium-sized pods. Pidge might have been able to fit inside one if they’d curled up, but there wouldn’t be much room to spare. They had no clue what it was for.

That was fine. Science was all about experimentation.

They closed their eyes and pretended they were coding. The Olkari were tech geniuses, after all. It stood to reason they’d build a simple program into their creations.

 _Run program,_ Pidge thought, feeling foolish. _Deploy pod. Uh… turn on?_ They cracked an eye and peered upward, but nothing had changed.

Scowling, they squeezed their eyes shut. _Just like programming._ Except they had no clue what language the Olkari were using, or what the program was designed to do, or how to input a command. But, hey, coding was at least fifty percent trial-and-error.

Somewhere between superimposing MS-DOS onto the tree bark and the mental equivalent of a keyboard smash, Pidge found what they were looking for. It was like an executable file lurking in the pith, a little _something_ just waiting for a push--and once Pidge ran it, the tree took care of the rest.

With a tremendous _crack_ , the pod separated from the branch, unfolding in midair into some kind of hoverbike, just big enough to seat two people. The outer shell hit the ground, but the vehicle itself hovered a few feet up, glowing quietly. It was utterly silent.

Keith turned, eyes wide, and Pidge cackled as they hopped into the driver’s seat. Instead of handlebars, the bike had two hollow cavities deep enough to fit Pidge’s arms nearly to the elbows. There were some buttons and something like a throttle at the bottom, and a little bit of experimentation found the gas, the breaks, and the steering, which was all a bike really needed.

They turned to Keith, grinning. “Get on, loser. We’re going flying.”

* * *

Pidge and Keith had been gone less than five minutes—not even enough time for Pidge to really figure out how to fly their new tree-bike—when the sirens went off. It sounded at first like a slight uptick in birdcalls, but the trees around them were suddenly full of activity.

A second later, Matt’s voice crackled through the comms. “Guys! Back to the lions, now!”

“What happened?” Keith demanded.

“Robeast.”

Pidge was pretty sure their heart stopped. Their body definitely did—all they seemed able to do was crane their neck to scan the sky for signs of impending doom.

Keith, thankfully, was quicker to recover. He stood up on the back of the bike, yanked Pidge away from the controls, and vaulted over them, settling in quickly in their place. Plunging his hands into the control sockets, he flared the boosters, tested his balance, then rocketed forward into a tight turn that had Pidge yelping and scrabbling for a hold on his armor.

“Are you _crazy_?” they shouted over the howling wind. “You don’t even know how to fly this thing!”

“So I’ll improvise,” Keith said and—damn him—he was smiling. He hunched lower over the controls and pushed them faster still. Pidge grimaced, but hunkered down into the pocket of relative stillness just behind Keith’s back.

“If you get us killed, Keith, I swear to quiznak...”

He just laughed.

Halfway back to the Grove, the sky lit up with lasers—ground-based, Pidge thought. The Olkari must have had defenses hidden among the trees. Not that Pidge could see much of the battle with all that nature in the way.

Back in the clearing where they’d first landed, Keith swung the bike’s back end around, skidding to a halt near Green. The Red Lion was nowhere to be seen, but that didn’t stop Keith. As soon as Pidge was off, he had the bike in motion again.

“Matt, I’m coming up,” he said as Pidge charged up Green's ramp.

Suddenly, Keith was airborne, sailing higher and higher until the bike stalled out. Pidge, stunned, dropped into their pilot’s seat as Keith pushed off from the bike. He hung suspended in open air for an instant, a hundred feet off the ground.

Red swooped in just as Keith began to fall.

“What the _hell_ was that?” Pidge cried.

Keith laughed, an exhilarated sound, as Matt said, “Language.”

“Language?” They recovered themself enough to get Green off the ground, and followed the lasers toward the excitement. “You don’t get to complain about my language when you just grabbed Keith out of the air like a dog catching a friggin' tennis ball.”

“You have to admit,” Keith said, appearing in the video feed from Red’s cockpit and strapping himself into the seat behind Matt’s. “It looked awesome.”

Pidge would admit no such thing. “Where’s Hunk?”

“Turret duty,” Hunk said. “I’m no good to you as a back-seat pilot.”

Matt clucked his tongue. “The others are incoming, but it’ll be a minute. We’ve just gotta keep this thing busy until then.”

It was at about this moment that Pidge caught sight of the robeast. It was, for once, not airborne—though Pidge couldn’t say whether it _couldn’t_ fly or just preferred to stay in the forest. The greenery did noticeably limit the Olkari defenses. A few of their weapons seemed more like catapults than lasers, launching glowing orbs that followed a lazy arc toward the beast. The rest sailed harmlessly over its head or fizzled out among the leaves.

The monster itself looked like some kind of mutant five-eyed deer. It stood head and shoulders above the canopy, massive, wicked-looking antlers rising twenty feet above its head. Canons ran down the length of its back, and some sort of shimmering wave emanated from its mouth every time it cried—a bleating sound, like a demonic goat.

“I thought we got rid of all the robeasts on Maorel,” Pidge complained, firing off a test shot as they hung back, well out of range. They didn’t know what the shimmery wave did, and they weren’t eager to find out. Their laser connected, but it didn’t leave any visible marks. Of course not. That would be too easy.

“There must be another lab somewhere,” Keith said. “Or more pilots held in warships or something.”

Pidge grimaced. “Wonderful.”

It probably said something about the way this war had been going that Pidge’s first thought upon seeing a hundred-foot-tall alien cyborg deer was, _Oh. This isn’t so bad._

That attitude, of course, only lasted until they really got into the battle. The deer robeast was tough, and it could give as good as it got—thick volleys of lasers that made the lions scream even with glancing blows, thundering hooves that trampled anything in its path. It wasn’t especially fast with an entire forest in the way, but it plodded on, wading through the trees like they were oddly-colored water. The Olkari village lay in its path.

Whether that was an accident, or whether it had come intending to destroy the rebels, Pidge didn’t know. They just knew it had to be stopped.

That was where the trouble started. Between the lasers and the shimmering wave, it was impossible to get close from above, but the trees made a natural shield around the robeast on all sides, protecting it from ground-based defenses. If this thing had any weak points, it wasn’t showing them.

“We’re gonna have to push the envelope sooner or later,” Matt muttered, like he was considering taking a hit from the mystery weapon just to see what it did.

“Let’s flank it,” Keith said. “If we keep low, those canons on its back won’t be able to reach us--”

“And it can’t spit two directions at once,” Matt finished. “Perfect. Pidge?”

Pidge wracked their brain for a better plan—anything—but they came up short. Reinforcements were too far out; another minute or so and the village was going to get trampled.

With an almighty sigh, Pidge wheeled around. “Fine. Don’t get yourselves killed.”

They came in fast, Red outstripping Green even across the short distance to the robeast. And that was with Pidge pushing faster than they probably should have. It wasn’t like they’d made a habit of skimming over treetops at full tilt—that sort of self-destructive thrill-seeking was generally Matt and Keith’s department, and the rest of the paladins were only too happy to keep their hands out of that pie.

But Pidge pushed themself now, unleashing on the robeast with a hail of lasers. They’d had no chance to charge Green’s shield, which meant LOKI was off the table. Which just figured. This robeast was the cockroach of giant evil robot creatures: not as dangerous as some of the others, but infinitely more annoying if only because it was impossible to kill.

Pidge’s laser struck the robeast in the eye and it reared, letting out a scream that rattled Pidge’s teeth. They barely had a chance to recover before it came down, rounding on the Green Lion.

“Uh-oh,” they muttered.

The shimmering wave hit like the screeching of a thousand birds, setting Pidge’s teeth on edge. They lost track of where they were or how long the assault lasted, ducking their head in a vain attempt to block out the cacophony.

The next thing they knew, Green was on the ground, sprawled where she had landed, her voice muddled in Pidge’s head.

Sharper than Green’s voice was Matt’s, screaming their name.

“’m fine,” they muttered, fighting with their restraints until the clasps fell away. “Did your plan even work?”

Matt was silent for a moment, and Pidge could just imagine the look he shared with Keith. “...No.”

Pidge snorted, crawling toward Green’s main computers. She still had power, but Pidge knew without trying the controls that they weren’t getting her off the ground in her current state. Everything seemed _off_ somehow, out of whack just enough to make the whole world blur.

“Well it looks like you’re gonna have to handle this one alone until the others get here. I’m pretty much grounded over here.”

Matt swore, and Keith growled. “We’ll figure something out,” Keith said. “Sounds like the castle’s just about here, anyway.”

“Cool.” Pidge was only half listening by now, drumming their fingers on the keyboard as the computers struggled through a diagnostic.

Something was _definitely_ scrambled after that last attack.

“Pidge!”

Pidge sat up, frowning at the voice. It wasn’t coming through the comms, but from outside the Green Lion. They shot one last look at the display screen, then scrambled up and out through the hatch on the top of Green’s head.

Ryner stood beside Green’s paw, one hand resting on the metal. Pidge felt a tingle as something _shifted_ deep within the lion, and a wave of nausea made them double over.

“Stop!” they cried, slithering off Green’s head and landing ungracefully near Ryner. “Whatever you’re doing, just. _Stop._ ”

Ryner lifted her hand off the hull, and Pidge’s world stopped spinning. They looked up to find Ryner staring back at them with wide eyes.

“I’m sorry—I had no idea you and the lion were symbionts.”

“Symbionts?” Pidge asked, arching an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I’d put it like that, but… yeah, sure, why not? Whatever gets you to stop messing around in there.”

“I was only trying to assist with repairs.”

Pidge opened their mouth to argue, then shut it again. The Olkari were technopaths. That meant that, in theory, Ryner could probably fix Green faster than anyone—if she knew what she was doing.

Ryner seemed to sense where Pidge’s mind had gone. She held one hand out, palm up, toward Pidge. “Just tell me what to do.”

On the comms, Keith swore again. Shiro called out for them to hold on—the other lions were coming—but what difference would it make? Two lions or four, the robeast wasn’t slowing down anytime soon. It had to be at the village by now. Pidge hoped the Olkari had managed to evacuate, but even if they had, the paladins had to be careful. Any attack they made was as likely to hurt the Olkari as the robeast.

Pidge couldn’t afford to sit this one out.

“All right,” they said, scrambling over to Ryner and placing their hand atop hers on Green’s hull. “Here’s the plan...”

* * *

The next few minutes were a blur, Pidge hastily sketching out an overview of Green’s systems and the damage that needed attention. Green fed them the information, Pidge passed it along, and after the first few hiccups, Ryner nodded and followed along like she’d been fixing up crashed space cats all her life. After a few minutes, Pidge stopped trying to analyze what was happening and let Green use them as a mouthpiece.

They stopped talking at one point, their mind swirling through Green's inner workings, a diagnostic display thrown up behind closed eyelids.

It took them a moment to realize Ryner was still keeping pace. It took Ryner just a moment longer to register Pidge's surprise.

They stared at each other for a moment before Pidge shook their head. There was no time to wonder about that. The robeast wasn't down yet. Pidge's friends needed them.

And just like that, they were done.

They stood back, grinning as Green climbed to her feet. Crystals had been nudged back into alignment, wires and Q-conduit spliced back together where they had been severed in the fall. The weapon—some kind of infrasonic blast, as near as Pidge could tell, had shattered some of the smaller crystals and caused a short in the shield system that had melted some of the surrounding supports.

Without scrap metal to work with, Ryner had had to improvise, threading plants between the armored plates and transforming them into a passable replacement for the damaged systems.

“It won’t hold for long,” Ryner warned.

Pidge shook their head. “It doesn’t need to.” Besides, Green didn’t seem to mind the low-tech fixes. If anything, she seemed _pleased_.

Pidge turned at the sound of an explosion, and frowned. The others had kept up a steady stream of chatter on the comms, but Pidge had mostly tuned it out. The robeast obviously wasn’t going down, and from the increasingly frantic shouts sounding in Pidge’s ears, it didn’t look like the others had struck on a viable strategy.

“What’s going on up there?” they demanded.

“Well, there’s the good news, and then there’s the bad news,” Lance said.

Hunk snorted. “Shay and Shiro got here just in time to headbutt that thing away from the village, but that’s just about the only victory we’ve managed.”

Lance let out a disappointed little groan. “You take all the drama out of everything.”

“Sorry?"

“Whatever.” Lance sniffed. “Point is, we’ve got it distracted for now, but it keeps trying to head back toward the village, and I’m not sure how much longer we can keep this up before someone else gets blasted with that death ray.”

“Infrasonic ray,” Pidge said distractedly. Lance said something in return, but Pidge’s mind was already onto the next problem. “That robeast has to have a weakness _somewhere_.”

Keith snorted. “Well, if it does, it’s nowhere we can get to.”

Now that was a thought. Pidge had assumed the robeast stayed among the trees because it couldn’t fly, but what if it was a self-defense mechanism? What if the easiest way to beat this thing was to come at it from underneath? To turn the forest from a shield into a trap?

They wheeled toward Ryner. “Can you make one of those technopathic headset things for the Green Lion?”

“What?”

“Your headset.” Pidge fluttered their hand toward the wooden circlet on Ryner’s head. “Can you do that for Green? Give us a way to alter the trees?”

“I might be able to create a conduit to the cockpit...” Ryner said slowly. “But you would need to provide the instructions—and that is much harder to do outside the engineered trees of the Grove.”

“Then you control it.”

Ryner blinked. “Me?”

Pidge gave her a shove toward Green. “I’ll fly, you turn this forest into an instrument of pine-scented death. How’s that sound?”

Ryner hesitated a moment longer, then chuckled. “I suppose it’s worth a try.”

“Great. Meet me inside as soon as you’re ready.” Pidge knocked twice on Green’s paw, then ran for her mouth, charging up the ramp at top speed.

They slowed only slightly at the sight of the cockpit—unchanged from a few minutes before except for the presence of a second chair beside Pidge’s. As Pidge watched, a pair of wooden sockets sprouted from the dashboard, growing in fast-forward until they resembled the controls of the hoverbike Keith had crashed.

No time to wonder. No time for questions. Pidge settled in at the controls and got Green ready for battle. Seconds later, Ryner appeared, faltered, then took a seat beside Pidge.

They traded looks, Pidge grinned, and Ryner thrust her hands into her wooden controls.

The Green Lion roared, a sound loud enough to rattle Pidge’s bones and startle the birds from their perches in the surrounding trees. Pidge cheered right along with her and urged her into a loping run. They dodged among the trees, tail streaming out behind them, claws digging into the soft earth below.

A soft blue glow spread out from Ryner’s hands, trailing across the dashboard, worming through Pidge’s mind like the glowing path of sparklers on the Fourth of July. This was new. This was _different._ Around them, the forest responded. Trees groaned and bowed around them, parting before them and interlacing overhead, a bubble of clear space that followed them through the forest.

This was _not_ the way the Olkari talent worked.

Not that Ryner--or Pidge--was complaining.

The robeast’s hooves came into view ahead, and Pidge put Green into a skid, hearing the _thunk_ and scratch of branches on her hull. Ryner’s antennae twitched. They skidded to a stop between the two front hooves.

Suddenly they were at the center of a whirlwind of green, leaves and branches and vines spinning around them, lashing around any part of the robeast they could find. Green roared, and the whirlwind expanded, enticing more distant plants to join the dance. Pidge and Ryner were caught up in that same dance, two minds--one mind--a million minds swirling together with the Green Lion's consciousness and wholly bent on the enemy in their midst.

“What the _quiznak_ is that?” Lance cried.

Pidge grinned as the robeast thrashed, hooves flashing. Trees were torn out of the ground by their roots, but the roots came alive, entwining with their neighbors as more and more plants joined the assault.

When the thrashing began to slow, Pidge eased Green out of the thicket they’d created. They soared skyward and found the robeast utterly immobilized. Little copses of saplings sprouted from the cannons on its back, and the leafy bonds fixed its head in place.

“Well that worked better than expected,” they said, and lifted a hand toward Ryner, who returned the high-five as easily as if she'd done it a thousand times before. Once she had, she stopped, head tilted to the side in confusion. Pidge grinned. “Also, I think I might have found my co-paladin.”

“Overachiever,” Matt muttered.

Keith just shook his head. “Let’s hurry up and finish this thing off.”

“Right,” said Shiro. Black and Red swooped down in tandem, jaw blades out, and cut two deep gashes in the robeast’s neck between the first and second cannon. It spasmed, letting out one last, feeble bellow, and then sagged in its bonds.

* * *

“You’re sure it won’t be a problem, you coming with us?” Pidge asked. They tried not to let on how much they wanted Ryner to stick around, but it was probably already moot. They had, after all, more or less shared a brain at the moment when Pidge remembered Matt’s description of syncing up. Ryner had gleaned all the relevant information from Pidge’s memories and volunteered to join Team Voltron before Pidge could begin to figure out how to ask.

She smiled now, resting a hand on Pidge’s head. “We Olkari are adaptable people. They will get along just fine without me.”

“Are you sure they’ll be safe, though?” Shiro asked. “The Galra obviously know we were here.”

“Olkarion exists in an uneasy truce,” Ryner said. “Our planet is occupied, our people constantly in danger. But we are on the verge of revolution. If Zarkon tries a large-scale assault, he will lose what little hold he has on our planet.”

Pidge frowned. “That still leaves the rebels out here at risk.”

“They will move on from this Grove.” Ryner gave a mysterious smile. “We can be very difficult to find when we want to be, you know.”

“Besides,” said Lance, waving a hand. “They’ve got the communicator thingy, right? Anything bad happens, and we’ll be back to stop it.”

Shay made a disgruntled noise and picked a petal off a flower more forcefully than necessary. “We should oust the Galra here while we have the chance. If the Olkari truly are near to revolt, why can we not rally them now?”

“Because Haggar knows too much about what we’re planning,” Shiro said curtly. “I hate the idea of walking away as much as any of you, but we don’t have a choice. We keep adding more precautions, and none of it makes a difference. Haggar always knows where we’re going, what we're planning. If we’re going to free this planet, we need a plan that will keep the casualties to an absolute minimum—and that means, at the _very_ least, a plan that Zarkon doesn’t know about beforehand.”

“We will return,” Ryner said with a nod. “Olkarion will survive a few weeks more.”

“I hope so,” muttered Hunk.

Pidge beamed and elbowed him in the side. “It’ll be fine! With Ryner on the team, we’ll figure out Haggar’s back door in no time, kick her out of Shiro's head, then be back to kicking Galra ass before you can say Entmoot.”

Matt snorted, reaching out to pull Pidge into a headlock. “All right, Pippin. Say goodbye to your tree friends and let’s get back to the castle.”

“ _Finally_ ,” Pidge muttered. They waved farewell to the Olkari who had come to see Ryner off, wrinkled their nose at the surrounding forest--less terrible now that Pidge had seen it strangle a robeast, but still muggy and gross--then turned and sprinted up the ramp into the Green Lion, Ryner close behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it turns out I'm terrible about keeping you all updated on my other projects. I meant to include this list two chapters ago, then forgot, so... whoops?
> 
> The Coran-centric prequel fic, ["One Week to Say Goodbye,"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9301925/chapters/21083582) is now complete. (And has been for several weeks...) Not only does it give you lots of Coran feels, but it also gives you more insight into the previous paladins (including Allura's mom) and the start of Zarkon's empire. If you haven't read it yet, I highly encourage you to check it out!
> 
> My other new(ish) project is ["Handbook of Demonology"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9894662/chapters/22180274), a modern witchcraft AU. Shiro, Matt, and Sam were the three members of the infamous Persephone Circle, a magical research team that vanished one year ago. Keith and Pidge are trying to find out what happened, and they hire Lance and Hunk, two amateur witches, to help. Together the four of them try to summon Zarkon, the demon responsible for the Persephone Circle's disappearance--except something goes wrong, and they accidentally summon Allura instead.


	15. Glimpses

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Voltron was making no headway in their efforts to understand Shiro's prosthetic arm, so they went to Olkarion, a planet of technopaths known for blending machine and nature. There they met Ryner, who was more than happy to help. But a robeast interrupted their geeking out, and the Green Lion was badly damaged in the fight. Ryner and Pidge worked to repair her, then co-piloted her and raised the forest itself against the robeast attacker.

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #1.3  
>  Dated two years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> CORE was founded in the year 9870 Imperial to study the effects of Quintessential deprivation and synthetic Quintessence. Since then, the CORE team has made noteworthy progress in their study of extended deprivation, but very little in the realm of Quintessential synthesis. That is why we are here.
> 
> Project Robeast exists to characterize the effects of synthetic Q and explore its potential application in the War of Conquest. Technopathy and cybernetic augmentations may create better soldiers, but only if we understand the side-effects and find a way to control them.
> 
> We act with the blessing and guidance of Lady Haggar, High Prince of the Emperor, Chief Druid, Right Hand of Our Lord Zarkon.
> 
> Vrepit sa.

* * *

Coran jumped as the timer on his work station chimed. Had it been two hours already?

Shaking his head, he leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes. It seemed hardly ten minutes had passed since he’d sat down to continue his foray into the schematics of Shiro’s arm. Maybe that was just because he’d made so little progress. Hunk, Matt, Pidge, and Ryner had sent him their notes (more questions than answers still) and Coran had set aside some time to review them.

It seemed he had to set aside time for everything these days—sleep included. There was just too much to be done. Maintenance and repairs around the castle, cleaning, training the paladins, instructing Tev and Zelka in the nuances of Altean battle ships. And of course, Shiro’s arm.

He could have easily spent his whole day on that problem alone, but doing so would have left the castle to waste away. Ten thousand years’ negligence led to a whole slew of problems, and even after two months, Coran hadn’t quite caught up on the backlog.

So he forced himself to stick to his schedule. Four hours of maintenance in the morning, two hours of reviewing whatever the paladins had sent him about Shiro’s arm the previous night—and now it was time to check in on his new apprentices.

It was Tev’s day off, which meant he was probably down on the fifth floor helping get the refugees’ quarters cleaned up. The lad was young, but Coran had to admire his work ethic.

Zelka was in the weapons array today, clearing the buildup from their last battle. Coran had been teaching her everything he could about the castle-ship, and she’d been passing it along bit by bit to other Galra who wanted to help out.

The whole delegating-tasks stystem was slow on the startup, but already Coran and the paladins had given up most of the cleaning tasks, except for in their own living quarters, on the training deck, and in the lions’ hangars. Zelka and her two brightest students were even starting to take over the simpler tasks on Coran’s weekly maintenance checklist.

He was pretty sure that was the only reason he hadn’t yet worked himself straight into a cryopod.

Typing out a few last, hasty notes on Shiro’s arm, Coran switched off his work station and headed for the elevators. He trusted Zelka enough to call him if she ran into anything she couldn’t handle, but he liked to check in on his helpers from time to time anyway. With as much as they were helping Coran out, he felt he owed them.

He heard them working from down the corridor, laughter and bright voices intermixed with the sound of metal scraping against metal and the occasional burst of pressurized water.

Coran stopped in the airlock, looking out into the maintenance dome that provided gravity and atmosphere for Zelka’s crew work as they worked on the castle’s external weapons array. Zelka herself was a commanding presence, when she wasn’t deferring to Coran or to one of the paladins. Cleaning the weapons systems was one of the more strenuous tasks in Coran’s job duties—simple, but time-consuming. It ordinarily took him the better part of a day to scrape out all the grime that built up in the pholotenes, polish and realign the focusing crystals, file and hammer away any warped edges that might cause problems with the guidance system, and give the whole thing a thorough wash.

This crew was making much faster work of it—more, he thought, than could be attributed to simply having more people to split the work.

The first of Zelka’s helpers sat on a hovering platform before the row of pholotenes—octagonal cavities in the ship’s hull where Quintessence was condensed into its weaponized form—reaching inside with a big metal scoop to pull out the residue. Her companion came behind her with the pressurized hose, cleaning away the mess.

Zelka herself came last, checking each pholotene in turn, then checking its focus through the lens overlay.

They chatted as they worked, talking about the children, and the other adults’ misadventures on the castle-ship, and their own youths, and a million other things. The easy camaraderie softened the military efficiency with which they worked, and it all reminded Coran sharply of the old Voltron Guard.

There were things, he was realizing, that weren’t quite as lost to history as he’d once assumed. The paladins had returned, Voltron was stronger than ever, and the Castle of Lions was slowly amassing the allies it needed to challenge Zarkon.

And then there were the whispers of New Altea.

It had been some time since Matt and Keith brought back their report of Jost’s final words, but Coran had never been able to put it fully out of his mind. New Altea. He itched to go there, to see whether the Altean rebellion Anamuri had spoken of was real, whether any of his people had escaped Zarkon’s hunt and managed to rebuild.

More likely than not, New Altea was less than what he was imagining. A headquarters for the Accords—the Galra rebellion—that only honored the old ways. More likely than not, there were no actual Alteans on New Altea, and no trace of the culture that had died with them. Keith could talk all he wanted about Altean survivors, but there was a large difference between a few refugees with Altean blood and the civilization implied by the name _New Altea._

It was these fears that kept Coran from speaking with Allura about the matter. She was settling in well with her new team, smiling more than she had in the early days of this fight. Coran wouldn’t ruin that with empty promises.

But those same promises pervaded his dreams. At night he walked down pristine halls, past gardens where children played with fluffy viffers, past ballrooms where lords and ladies danced the tellet to familiar symphonies. At night he stood on a balcony beside King Alfor and Queen Lealle, looking out over a world at peace.

His dreams threatened to take over his mind even when he was awake, tugging at him always to search the database for signs of New Altea or where it might be hidden—though he already knew there was nothing to find. Not in the stellar maps Coran had access to. Not in any of the broadcasts they had intercepted. If New Altea did exist, he didn’t know how to find it.

Eventually Zelka caught sight of Coran and waved to him. She barked one last instruction to her helpers, then lowered her hovering platform to the ground and hurried toward Coran, saluting as she approached. The old Altean salute—two fingers raised vertically to her temple—still came awkwardly to her; he could see her body twitching toward the deep bow that was customary in Zarkon’s army, but she insisted on doing things properly.

Coran clasped his hands behind his back and nodded to her, allowing a moment of formality before relaxing. In all honesty, Zelka was far more of a stickler for protocol than Coran had ever been, which was probably a good thing, as Tev paid protocol no mind at all. Coran had tried to strike a balance. Tev and Zelka both followed orders as well as any soldier in the heat of battle, and Coran rather thought it was pointless to try to turn a three-man team into an official hierarchy.

Someday, perhaps, it would be necessary once more. Until then, Coran treated his gunner and his mechanic as colleagues more than subordinates.

“How’s it coming?” Coran asked, rocking back on his heels as his eyes wandered up in time to catch another powerful blast from the cleaning hose. Water cascaded to the ground beneath the pholotenes, and a fine mist drifted further out to cool Coran’s skin.

Zelka tried to suppress a smile, but her luminous eyes brightened with pride. “We’re nearly finished here. I thought we’d check on the secondary shield generators afterwards, and then break for lunch.”

Coran raised his eyebrows. “You _are_ coming along.”

Zelka did smile then, bowing her head modestly. “It’s all thanks to your teachings, Captain.”

Captain. By the ancients! He really needed to set Zelka straight about this protocol of hers. There had been a time when Coran had been an officer, yes. When Alfor captained the Castle of Lions, Coran’s place as an adviser had granted him the rank of lieutenant commander, but that had been at least seventy percent honorary. _Captain._

Coran glanced skyward and shook his head. He’d told Zelka before that the title was unnecessary, but it never seemed to sink in.

“All right then,” he said, clapping his hands together. “I’ll leave you to it. Give a holler if you need anything.”

“Of course, sir.” Zelka saluted again, and Coran left the enclosure in search of more distractions. His brain itched to return to the plethora of problems awaiting him on the bridge, but he forced himself to press the button for the seventh floor when he reached the elevator. A few more minutes to clear his head. A bit more walking to loosen his stiff joints. He’d be more use to everyone with a clear head.

His wandering brought him eventually to the rec room, and he stopped in the doorway, more than a little surprised to find someone here. Shiro and Allura were careful to allow the paladins a reasonable amount of free time each day, well aware that overwork could be just as dangerous to Team Voltron as a lack of preparation.

Nevertheless, most of the paladins had a worrisome tendency to work straight through breaks. And meals. And rest periods, for that matter. If they weren’t studying Shiro’s arm or squaring off against the gladiator or meditating with their lions, they were helping the Galra refugees get settled or cleaning the castle or in the computer core seeking the counsel of the former paladins.

Coran was as proud of their dedication as he was worried for their health. So he was pleasantly surprised to find Keith and Lance both in the rec room, shoes kicked off, sitting on their feet facing each other from opposite ends of one section of sofa. Each had a tablet on his lap, a holographic display spread out above the screen. It took Coran only a moment to recognize the game— _eshet_. Lance had become quite obsessed with the game, though Coran’s duties had prevented him from playing recently. He’d showed Lance how to challenge the ship’s AI at the same time he’d introduced the boy to several new game modes, but nothing could compare to a match against another sentient being.

Keith’s brow was furrowed, and he shifted half a dozen windows around on his display. He caught his lip between his teeth and grunted in frustration, then lifted a hand to the main window and tapped out a sequence of orders with his claw.

Lance’s face split into a grin, and he leaned forward almost before Keith had signaled the end of his turn. Lance’s fingers flew across his screen, bringing up a few unit files as he issued orders. The game chimed as Lance took out one of Keith’s units, and Keith’s display flashed red. Another order, another chime, another flash of red.

Keith winced with each blow to his army, and by the time Lance’s turn was over, Keith was watching through a gap in his fingers. He searched his screen for a chance at salvation, sighed, and surrendered.

“Dude,” Lance said, laughing. “It’s a game of strategy.”

“Frontal assault _is_ a strategy,” Keith said, sitting up straight in indignation. His lips were twitching, though, and when Lance slumped sideways against the back of the couch, still laughing, Keith had to purse his lips to maintain his angry facade. “Oh, like you were any better when you started.”

Lance wiped away a tear, giving Keith a smug, half-lidded look. “I never martyred six of my thorrups because, you, quote, _didn’t like the look of that harricarvel_.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“And left you open to the north flank’s retribution,” Lance said. He paused, tapping his chin. “I will admit that sabotage ploy was pretty cool.” Keith’s answering smirk was so smug Lance groaned and reached across the gap between them to cover Keith’s mouth before he could respond. “Don’t ruin the moment with gloating. I’ve more than got us covered on that front.”

Keith laughed, fighting off Lance’s hands. “Okay, well, as _fun_ as this has been--” He grimaced, tossing his tablet onto the cushion beside him. “--three crushing defeats is enough for one day.”

“Wait!” Lance latched onto Keith’s wrists as he started to stand, staring up at him with round eyes. “One more game?”

“Can’t you play against the computer?”

“But that’s _boring_.” Lance waggled his eyebrows enticingly. “If we play Revolution, you can be the military state I’m trying to overthrow. You might even beat me, Keith, the rebels get, like. _Nothing_.”

Keith tugged weakly at Lance’s hold on his wrists. “It’s no fun destroying someone obviously weaker than you.”

“I don’t know, Keith, I’ve been having an awful lot of fun beating _you_.”

Keith scowled at him.

Coran took the opportunity to step into the room. “I’ll play a match with you, Lance,” he said brightly.

“Oh.” Lance tried for a smile, but couldn’t completely cover his shudder. “Great. Hey, Keith. Stick around, and you can watch me get my ass handed to me.”

Keith raised an eyebrow, but said nothing as he took a seat on the back of the sofa beside Lance, leaning his elbow on Lance’s shoulder to get a better look at the display. Lance stiffened for a moment, glancing sideways at Keith, then cleared his throat and selected Revolution mode.

Smiling, Coran selected one of the pre-made defender teams, which the castle-ship had created based on the data from one of Voltron’s missions the generation before Coran joined the Guard. An invading army had taken over a less-advanced neighbor planet and started systematically exterminating the locals. A small rebellion had managed to fight back long enough to take over a communications hub and call Voltron for aid.

This wasn’t the first time Coran had challenged Lance to an asymmetrical battle. The boy seemed to like Revolution (where he had to assassinate one specific target or fulfill other narrow mission objectives, rather than simply wipe out all of Coran’s forces) more than Siege (where he had to survive a certain length of time while Coran tried to break through his defenses)--but he also made it harder on himself by refusing to sacrifice any of his rebels. (“They have _names_ , Coran! They have families! I can’t send them to their deaths!”)

A few minutes later, they were ready, and Lance grimaced as he took the first move of what he obviously expected to be a lopsided fight.

Coran did win, but it was a very near thing. “Guess I can’t go easy on you anymore, eh?” Coran said when they were finished.

From Lance’s grin, he knew _exactly_ how close he’d come to winning.

* * *

“Princess Allura? How old are you?” Dagmar asked, her eyes wide and bright against her violet fur.

Edi slapped a hand to her forehead and stomped on Dagmar’s foot. “You can’t just _ask_ that,” she hissed at Dagmar. “She’s a vrekking _princess_.”

Dagmar clapped both hands over her mouth and stared at Edi in horror, her ears twitching as Princess Allura threw the training bot across the room, then turned toward her pupils. “ _Edi_ ,” Dagmar squeaked. “You’re not supposed to say that word! Hava Zelka said--”

“Hava Zelka isn’t here right now.” Edi sniffed, pretending she didn’t notice her twitching ears as Allura tapped her staff on the ground.

Both girls snapped their heels together and turned toward Allura, who arched an eyebrow. “I’m sorry. Did I call a time out when I wasn’t paying attention?”

“No, Princess Allura,” Dagmar said. She clutched her staff to her chest, curling around it like a kid around a plush toy. Edi supposed that was fine—Dagmar was only eleven standard, after all. Still a kid. Her being here at all, learning self defense from the Altean princess, was pretty impressive.

Edi wasn’t a child. She was twelve and a half standard, and she could take whatever Allura dished out.

“Sorry, ma’am,” Edi said, snapping her staff back under her armpit in the ready position Allura had taught them on the first day. She resisted the urge to stick her tongue out at Dagmar and say _I told you not to ask the Princess dumb questions._

A smile twitched at Allura’s lips. “Good,” she said, shifting her stance to a more casual one. Edi relaxed her grip on her staff, and Dagmar straightened, blinking up at Allura. Edi wondered if Dagmar remembered the instructors on the _Reaper_ the way Edi did. Probably not—Dagmar had been sent to Revinor halfway through her first year of training, while Edi had made it to her fourth before she’d balked at what would have been her first kill.

Allura wasn’t like the instructors Edi remembered, who had shouted and lashed out and set harsh punishments for even something as little as talking out of turn. Allura was kind, and patient, and she never made Edi feel useless even when she messed up in training.

Almost half the Galra in the castle trained with Allura, at least sometimes. No one was forced to, but the adults claimed to like the exercise (though Edi thought they just wanted to see the princess up close.) Most of the kids stayed away, though. Only Dagmar and Tik came along with Edi when she came to lessons, and them not always. Dagmar was always there, but she sometimes sat against the wall and watched while Allura made Edi run drills and practice strikes and—every now and then—spar against the fancy robot gladiator.

Tik only showed up when he wanted to, usually partway through the lesson, and wandered out again before it was done. More than once, he’d dropped from the air duct on the ceiling to land on top of Edi—just to annoy her, she was certain.

Thankfully, he wasn’t here today, and Dagmar was mostly paying attention, which meant Edi could actually focus on the lesson. She preferred it when it was just her and Allura, when she could focus on learning how to fight. How to protect.

Allura demonstrated a chain of strikes with her staff, a dance with an imaginary partner, then gestured for the two girls to do the same. Dagmar lost track of herself halfway through, but Edi had been paying attention. Her staff moved like a part of her, sliding easily through her hands as she spun and struck and blocked, the motions coming easier than the brutish hacking she’d learned on the _Reaper_.

When she stopped, Edi turned toward Allura, holding her breath.

Allura smiled. “Excellent work, Edita. Why don’t you run it again while I help Dagmar with that tricky bit in the middle?”

“Can I fight the gladiator after?” Edi asked, trying not to sound too eager.

After a moment’s hesitation, Allura nodded. “One match,” she said.

Edi beamed, running the sequence again with even more enthusiasm.

It was funny. She hadn’t wanted to be a soldier back when that was what her uncle wanted her to do. He was a mean, grumpy man who had never smiled except when he sent her off to the _Reaper_ to learn—and to stay out of his way.

But seeing what the paladins did—seeing what the _princess_ did—Edi decided that it wasn’t the fighting that was the problem. She wouldn’t ever be a soldier, not like her uncle was.

 _She_ was going to be a paladin.

* * *

There were strangers aboard the _Hope of Kera._

Jeya wasn’t, _technically_ , supposed to be part of the welcoming committee, but Commander Anamuri hadn’t posted guards at the hangar doors, and after all Jeya was a mechanic. Wasn’t _her_ fault she needed an attenuator from the wreckage of Wela’s old ship. (And no one needed to know she’d left it up here on purpose when she’d heard the _Harbinger_ was coming.)

The crew was just emerging when Jeya slipped in through the side door. She ducked behind a fighter awaiting repairs as one of Anamuri’s officers glanced toward the sound of the door hissing shut. When the next moment didn’t bring angry shouts, Jeya figured she was in the clear.

She crept closer to the hushed voices, staying out of sight. Everyone knew Voltron had sent a new ally to _Kera_ on _Harbinger_ , but what Jeya couldn’t figure out was why the meeting was happening _here_. Any friend of Voltron should have warranted a big ceremony. Maybe a feast! Not all this skulking about.

“We don’t plan to stay long, ma’am,” said a low, rough voice. “Just wanted to introduce ourselves so we don’t get shot outta the sky next time we come in to deliver a haul.”

Shot out of the sky? Jeya frowned, only narrowly resisting the urge to thump her tail against the ground in frustration. What the quel kind of allies _were_ these?

The next fighter in line—a new salvage that still needed to be checked for fail-safes before it was powered on—was up on mag lifts, leaving a narrow space underneath. Jeya dropped to the ground, her feathered crest brushing the ship’s underbelly, and slithered forward.

When she got her first good look at the _Harbinger_ , she gasped. She clapped a hand over her snout, glancing anxiously at the cluster of bodies near the ramp, but they were still too far away to have heard her. Which was good, because all her best efforts couldn’t stop an excited trill from leaking out.

That was a _Galra_ ship—modded all to cosmos and almost unrecognizable for the wear and tear, but definitely Galra underneath. Even from this distance Jeya could identify some of the custom work—enhanced shields, new comms. There was sure to be a few cloaks and jammers on board, too, because the mods weren’t the only thing Jeya recognized.

There on the hull, below the Galran script Jeya could only assume read _Harbinger_ , was a symbol Jeya recognized. The language it belonged to was long-dead, a hundred thousand years or more, and only a handful of glyphs had persisted to modern times. Jeya didn’t remember what this one translated to, literally. Freedom, maybe, or something similar.

What it _meant_ , though. That was unmistakable.

“You’re _rebels?_ ”

Jeya hadn’t meant to say the words aloud, but it was too late to take them back now. Anamuri and her officers and the new allies—the rebels—the _smugglers—_ all turned toward her and, flushing, Jeya shrank deeper under the ship.

“Jeya!” Anamuri snapped. “Get out from under there.”

Jeya scowled, but did as she was told. She hesitated a moment by her would-be hiding spot, then started forward, smoothing the stained and rumpled fabric of her work smock as she went.

“We are rebels,” said the same stranger as before, a twist of amusement in his voice. “Got that in common, I guess.”

Okay, that was fair. Of all the things she might have said to get herself caught, she hadn’t exactly picked the most clever. Huffing, she looked up at the newcomer, only to have her voice desert her as she registered the purple hue of his skin, the white hair, the short but noticeable claws at the tip of each finger.

Well, that would explain why they were being so sneaky about this whole meeting. The Kera Rebellion liked to go on about how it was a safe haven for anyone who’d been hurt by the Galra Empire, but Jeya knew not everyone thought that hospitality should extend to people with Galra heritage.

Jeya stopped just short of the welcoming committee and crossed her arms atop a crate of condensers, grinning at the newcomers—the Galra (part Galra?) man, the violet-eyed Rylossian woman, and their boxy cyber-unit. “2KT, huh?” Jeya said, grinning at them.

The man blinked, glancing over his shoulder at his ship, and the woman’s pretty face pinched in irritation.

“I _told_ you not to put that damn thing back on our hull,” she muttered.

The man chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck. “Heh. Guess I let nostalgia get the better of me.”

Jeya’s eyes darted to the ship’s hull. The paint around the 2KT glyph did seem a little bit fresher than the rest, now that she thought about it. Not _fresh_ , just not quite as weathered as the rest of the _Harbinger_. She grinned. “Coming out of retirement, are we?”

“Something like that,” said the woman dryly, and the cyber-unit gave a ratcheting noise that sounded like laughter. The woman scowled and gave it a half-hearted thump.

“My parents ran a 2KT,” Jeya said, and her smile faltered. “Used to.”

There was a flash of understanding in the strangers' eyes, which as good as confirmed Jeya’s suspicion. They’d had a larger crew before, but something had happened to the rest of them, and these two had retired. She wondered what the paladins of Voltron had done to convince them to rejoin the fight.

“I’m Jeya,” she said, holding out one stout, clawed hand.

The man moved first, shaking her hand and smiling when she returned it with vigor. “Rolo,” he said. “That’s Beezer, and the grumpy one’s Nyma.”

Nyma’s scowl deepened, but when Rolo jerked his chin, she rolled her eyes and came over to give Jeya a curt handshake, too.

Anamuri cleared her throat.

Jeya’s topfeathers lifted away from her head, only laying flat again when she blew out a long sigh. “Right, right. Sorry, Commander.” She flashed a smile toward Rolo and Nyma, then started backing toward the place where she’d left the attenuator. “I’m just gonna. Take this. And… go.”

Anamuri’s already wrinkled face pruned more as she arched an eyebrow, and Jeya’s feathers ruffled in embarrassment. Yeah, so no one was buying her excuse. She probably should have seen that one coming.

“We should talk before you go!” Jeya called to the smugglers, then turned and all but sprinted from the hangar.

* * *

She did not, in the end, get to see Rolo and Nyma again before they headed out. Anamuri said it was because the rebellion needed some hard-to-find parts quickly, and their new suppliers had wanted to get to searching right away.

Jeya figured it was some combination of Anamuri’s intimidating personality and bad experiences with fellow rebels’ reactions to a Galra smuggler. Which was total chylshit, by the by, but whatever. Jeya wasn’t going to blame _them_ for it.

Still, she wished she could have gotten a better look at those enhancements on the _Harbinger_. They’d been in good condition considering the obvious battlewear the ship had seen, and Jeya had been hoping to pick up a few tips. She’d known enough engineers and inventors in her life to chafe when she was stuck in the cockpit of a factory-standard fighter, but she didn’t have quite enough technical know-how to mod it herself.

Jeya only had a few days to mope about missed opportunities, though. It figured. Things had been pretty quiet lately—no news except some bloated old rumors about unrest on the Galra homeworld.

When the first reports of a gathering fleet began to trickle in, people got nervous. Scouts were sent out, inside agents redirected to find out the target. The fleet was far too large for the _Kera_ to take on alone, but if they could send Voltron…

Ten days after Rolo and Nyma’s first visit to the _Hope of Kera_ , Anamuri found her answer:

The Galra fleet was aimed at the very heart of the Kera Sector, and it was days away from launch.

* * *

The third time Tik hit his head against the top of the air duct, he wondered if he shouldn’t have gone to training with Edi and Dagmar, after all.

It wasn’t _that_ bad, really. He got to run around and hit things with a big stick, and no one told him to be quiet or settle down or play nice. (Except the one time he accidentally hit Dagmar in the nose and she’d started crying. But that had been an accident, and Tik had already apologized before Allura had to tell him to, so that didn’t really count.)

But training always made his arms hurt the day after. _This is training, not playing,_ Allura always said, and Tik had quickly learned that _training_ was just another word for work.

Eight-year-olds weren’t supposed to _work_.

Pausing at a grate, Tik lay flat on his belly and squinted out through the mesh at the room underneath him. Small table with a chair, some boxes in the corner, a bed…

A _bed_?

Tik frowned, pressing his face harder against the grate until the metal started bruising his skin, even through his fur. Yup. That was a bedroom. How the knect had he wound up back by the bedrooms?

Heaving a sigh, Tik wiggled forward. Maybe the ducts were magic portals. That sounded like something that could happen in an Altean castle. After all, Voltron lived here, and Voltron was supposed to be just a story. Air ducts that whisked you off to someplace random every time you blinked weren’t really _that_ strange.

It was hard to say how long he’d been crawling around in here, peeking through vents looking for Pip. Long enough his knees were hurting and his back felt worse than if he’d spent all day letting Allura trick him into exercise. He should have just stayed with Azra and Maka and listened to one of Zuza’s stories.

Tik wrinkled his nose as soon as he had the thought. Stories were boring, no matter how many voices Zuza did. He’d rather break his back crawling around in the dust than fall asleep listening to baby stories.

The magic castle portal ducts eventually figured out where Tik wanted them to take him, and he flopped forward in relief when he spotted the familiar open space of the Green Lion’s hangar. The only vent here was on the wall over the door, where Tik had a good view of the hangar.

It looked different now that Ryner had moved in.

“What is _that_?”

Pip’s voice sounded hollow through the vent, but Tik grinned. He knew they’d be here, when he hadn’t found them in the Game Room or the Nap Room or the Quiet Place. They could have been in Pip’s Place—the one hidey-hole Tik wasn’t allowed to see—but he knew they weren’t. They only went there when they wanted to hide from the other paladins, and today Pip’s brother was busy with Bee, making things that exploded (which would have been cool, except Matt wouldn’t let Tik play with the actual explosives) and all the other adults were busy doing adult things.

Pip must have been standing right underneath Tik, because he couldn’t see them from where he was, but they sounded squeaky and annoyed like Edi did when Tik showed up and didn’t pay attention to the princess’s lessons.

“That?” Ryner asked. “That’s a garden.”

“But what’s it doing in _here_?”

“Growing, I should hope.”

Pip stumbled through a few nonsense words before Tik got bored of lying in the dusty air duct and pushed the vent open. He poked his head out, spotted Pip’s messy hair below him, and grinned.

“Pip!” he cried, and pushed himself out of the vent as Pip looked up at him.

They squawked like a Green Crested Fahlbird, but caught him easily enough. Maybe not _easily—_ they _did_ drop to the ground under his weight with a grunt, and groaned as he rolled off them--but he didn't think they were _hurt._

“I never should have shown you how to get into the ventilation system,” they muttered, still sprawled on the ground as Tik stood up and shook the dust from his fur.

“Get up,” Tik said, tugging on Pip’s hand. “Come on! I wanna show you something.”

Pip sat up, but they didn’t stand yet, just stared up at Tik with narrowed eyes. “Okay, new rule: if you want something from me, you don’t fling yourself out of a hole in the ceiling onto my head.”

Tik rolled his eyes. “How else was I gonna get your attention? _Duh_.” Unimpressed, Pip crossed their arms, and Tik sagged backward, only his hold on Pip’s hand keeping him from falling on his tail. “I only did it cause I was up there already anyway,” he said. “I found another room!”

Pip’s eyes widened, sparkling in that way that meant they were interested. (Of course they were, they got all giddy any time they found a room without doors, a room you could only get into through the air ducts.)

Pip was on their feet in an instant, and only paused at the door to point a finger back at Ryner. “We’re not done talking about the garden.”

Ryner just smiled and reached out a dirt-covered hand to poke a few more holes in her garden patch. “Of course not,” she said. “Have fun with the little one. Don’t keep him out too late.”

“Yes, _Mom_ ,” Pip muttered. They looked down at Tik (not _so_ far down; Pip only had a few fingerwidths on him), grinned, and struck a dramatic pose. “All right, T-man. Lead the way!”

* * *

The universe, Nyma decided, had a shitty sense of humor.

Her life had always been a pendulum, swinging wildly between periods of reckless abandon, full of loss and pain and bad decisions, and periods of relative stability. Not happiness—she hadn’t been truly happy since she was a kid who thought war was a thing of storybooks—but contentment at the very least. She’d _liked_ what she had going with Rolo and Beezer. A little bit of danger, a nice fat paycheck at the end of each run, a bank growing ever larger, carrying her towards retirement on a world far away from the Empire.

Leave it to Voltron to upend that semblance of order. They’d trashed her ship, which left her and Rolo all but broke after haggling for parts on a lonely little swap moon in a backwater system. The delay had cost them their latest job, a big one, one that would have recouped their losses if they’d gotten off the ground just a little quicker.

But they hadn’t, and their client wasn’t the sort to accept, “A paladin of Voltron trashed my thrusters,” as an excuse for missed delivery.

They’d almost been back into the rhythm of their lives when they ran into Voltron a second time and Rolo—damn selfless Rolo, always looking for his chance to be a hero—had signed them up for the thankless job of supplying a rebellion that was only going to get itself killed anyway.

Nyma had done the rebel thing once. She knew how this story ended.

But Rolo was a force of nature, his exuberance a rare but powerful thing, and Nyma was powerless to stop him once he got himself set on the path of martyrdom. _Someone’s got to fight them_ , he always told Nyma. _And since I’ve got no place in this universe till it’s clear of Zarkon’s shadow, it might as well be me._

He offered to cut ties, of course. He always did, and Nyma, as always, smacked him in the back of the head with a wrench on her way to fix the gravity core that had been acting up the last few days.

“Like you could pay me for my half of the ship,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere without my money.”

Beezer buzzed a laugh, and when Nyma turned to shot him a quelling glare, she found Rolo smiling at her. “Thanks, Nyma.”

She snorted and went to deal with the gravity core.

* * *

Running supplies for the Kera Rebellion wouldn’t have been the worst gig in the universe if only it paid a little better. It was the same work they always did, just with a client who was actively fighting back against the Empire. That upped the risk for the _Harbinger_ , but only a little. If these rebels got themselves killed, it wasn’t likely the handful who’d seen Nyma’s face would live long enough to sell them out.

Even if they did, as long as the _Harbinger_ wasn’t on board when the battle began, they wouldn’t be in much more trouble than they already were. Wasn’t like they’d never had a bounty on their heads.

But the rebels were rebels, after all, which meant they were more than a little strapped for cash. Most of their members had ditched their old lives to fight, and not a lot of them had been rich to start with. If Kera was anything like the last rebellion Nyma had been a part of, they would have a handful of wealthy benefactors keeping them afloat from their positions comfortably atop the meat grinder of Empire economics.

Anamuri hadn’t been so idealistic as to assume Rolo and Nyma were in this for the warm fuzzies of sticking it to the Emperor (though in all honestly, Rolo might have gotten caught up in the idea of it and done just that), but the number she’d named had been so low as to be offensive.

Thankfully Nyma had been faster than Rolo (who surely would have accepted), and managed to negotiate them a decent wage, if not a particularly high one.

They were back from their first run in two days, and Anamuri seemed legitimately impressed with the salvage they’d managed to collect—shield generators, hull-mounted laser cannons, stabilizers, nav computers, even most of a wormhole generator and a whole slew of crystals. Most of it would need minor repairs before it worked, or would have to be cannibalized to fix something a little less battered, but Anamuri had everything she’d asked for.

Apparently she didn’t realize just how many rebellions Zarkon’s armies had crushed over the millennia, how many wastelands of dead ships there were floating in the vastness of space.

The little feathered reptilian girl was there again the second time they returned to the _Hope of Kera_ , better hidden than the last attempt, watching from the shadows as Rolo and Nyma handed over a datastick full of stolen plans.

“Been a while since we did this sort of thing,” Rolo said with a chuckle to cover the nerves that had begun to show late the night before as he crouched before a computer at a little-used Empire outpost, helping Beezer find the deployment records while Nyma sighted down the length of her rifle, expecting the guard to return at any moment.

When was the last time they’d staged a diversion? Waiting for the enemy to abandon the wreckage before moving in was more their style.

Rolo had suffered a laser burn on his arm in the escape, but he’d crowed with pride as they fled the base, Beezer echoing his joy.

(Nyma had sighed and suffered them and fingered the rifle at her side, wondering how many more times she’d have to drag them out of danger.)

Days crawled by, and the _Harbinger_ got the rebellion the supplies and information it needed. More supplies than information, but Nyma doubted their luck would hold much longer on that front, if the light in Anamuri’s eyes when they’d delivered the datastick was any indication.

After a few jobs, Anamuri let them pick through the rebellion’s stockpiles for better shields and better weapons. Rolo had been delighted; Nyma tried not to groan. She knew what was coming. Better armed smugglers meant tougher jobs (and less pay, since Anamuri had so generously donated the parts.)

If Anamuri started suggesting they take on some of her rebels as additional crew, Nyma was out.

For now, though, they were after weapons. Pulsers, to be exact. They weren’t exactly rare, but they were designed for war—high rate of fire, long range, wide spray. In a full-scale battle, a pulser could rupture the cockpits of a dozen fighters simultaneously.

And of course the Empire owned the only factories. You could buy one or two at a time on the black market, but Anamuri wanted a whole contingent of pulser ships to soften up the enemy in future battles, and that meant going to the source.

They took their time on this one, scouting out the weapons depot Anamuri had pointed them towards. The _Harbinger_ was outfitted with the best cloaking technology available—better than anything the Empire knew about, especially after Rolo and Beezer were done making their improvements. So they lingered in orbit around the moon where the depot was situated, watching the air traffic, making note of the defenses.

“There are way too many warehouses down there,” Nyma hissed, flicking idly through the results of the latest batch of scans. “Even if we could get down there, steal the pulsers, and get out without anyone noticing, we don’t know where to start.”

The look on Rolo’s face promised trouble. “Guess we’re gonna have to scope things out.”

“Don’t,” she warned.

But Rolo was already up and headed to the back of the cockpit. Nyma snapped at Beezer to keep an eye out, then stalked after him. Behind the cockpit was the cramped crew quarters—really just a bathroom and two small bunks with some hatches along the walls for storage. Most of the upper deck was taken up by the engine room, accessed through the door at the back of the crew quarters, but Rolo headed for the lift in the corner.

Nyma slipped inside just before the door closed and crossed her arms, leaning back against the door. She glared at Rolo as the lift descended toward the cargo hold, and when it stopped he smiled, lifted her aside, and crossed to a storage cube anchored to the wall.

In the course of their questionably legal career, Rolo and Nyma had picked up a wide array of disguises. Armor, military uniforms, janitorial smocks, local fashions from a number of Galra-majority worlds. Nyma wasn’t at all surprised when Rolo went straight for the armor they’d taken from a Galra soldier.

“You’re not going down there alone.”

Rolo flashed her a smile as he discarded his vest and kicked off his boots. He stripped off his pants without missing a beat—when you shared a room the size of a closet with a person, you couldn’t cling too tightly to modesty—and started wiggling into the black bodysuit. “They’ll recognize you or Beezer in an instant,” he said, and grunted a little as the breastplate fought him.

Nyma heaved a sigh, but took pity on him, and helped him with the rest of the armor as well. Once the helmet was in place, she had to admit he looked the part.

“I’ll keep my comms on the whole time,” he said. “And once I find the right hangar, you bring the ship down and we load up. Easy.”

“Suicidal,” Nyma shot back.

Rolo just grinned.

There was no stopping him, though, so Nyma stood beside the airlock as Rolo crouched over the one-man glider. It was small and fast, but Nyma wouldn’t have taken the glider into enemy territory for a million GAC. All it offered was basic steering, a narrow shield to keep you from burning up as you entered the atmosphere, and landing thrusters so you didn’t end up as a smear of guts on the ground.

But of course a ship—even just an escape pod—would have drawn too much attention.

Nyma stayed to watch Rolo launch, closing her eyes as he dwindled to a speck. “You’d better not get yourself killed, asshole,” she muttered, and pounded twice on the airlock door before heading back up to the cockpit.

He kept quiet during the descent, but Beezer tracked his position, displaying it on the screen. Nyma held her breath as he neared the ground, an old, aching part of her expecting him to be shot out of the sky at any moment. She thought she’d buried that part of her with Tella and the others. Apparently not.

But Rolo touched down just inside the weapons depot’s perimeter without incident, dragging his glider into an alley between warehouses and stowing it behind some dusty metal crates before checking in.

“Pretty quiet right now,” he said.

Nyma snorted. “I should hope so. It’s the middle of the local night cycle. If there were soldiers crawling all over the place right now I’d be damn near ready to hand Anamuri my letter of resignation.”

Rolo chuckled, his beacon creeping across the map of the area, pausing beside the first warehouse. “Aw, c’mon Nyma,” he said, a faintly patronizing tone to his words. “Don’t you wanna be a hero?”

“I’d rather be alive,” she snapped.

Rolo’s voice turned wistful. “Everybody dies sometime.”

Nyma scowled, running through the ship’s stealth systems to give her nervous hands something to do. “Not us,” she said. “Not today.”

Rolo didn’t answer her, just stepped up to the warehouse door. A faint beep sounded over the comms, and the hiss of an opening door. Rolo hummed, then hurried on to the next warehouse. “Rifles,” he said after the third stop. “All rifles. This must be the ground troops’ stores. I’m gonna check another block.”

Beezer chirped a suggestion to try the northern quadrant—he’d spotted more landing pads there than the other regions, maybe for installation of the big weapons, pulsers included.

“Be careful,” Nyma said. Not that she thought Rolo would ever get truly careless. Not where there weren’t real live people to save, anyway. He was a bleeding heart martyr, but he wasn’t stupid. He’d been fighting back longer than Nyma had. He’d _taught_ her a thing or two about survival.

Still, she couldn’t help worrying.

It was just a few minutes (a few long, painful minutes) before Rolo let out a sigh of relief. “Finally,” he muttered. “I found them.” He must have called up the image Anamuri had provided for them, because the same thing flashed on Nyma’s display: a squat, wide-mouthed cannon with a broad base.

Nyma closed her eyes for a second, shooting a grateful thought toward the cosmos. “Perfect. I’m coming in now.”

“I’m ready to be swept off my feet, my dear lady.”

Rolling her eyes, Nyma checked the cloak, scrambler, and suppressor—three mostly redundant systems for triple the assurance. “I’m swooning,” she deadpanned. “Just be ready for me, okay?”

“You got it.”

Nyma had barely begun to turn the ship around when Rolo inhaled sharply. She tensed, glancing at Beezer, who cranked the volume on Rolo’s comms. Nyma could just barely hear something shuffling around, almost inaudible beneath Rolo’s shallow breathing.

“What is it?” Nyma demanded. “Rolo?”

“Shh.”

The hiss was hardly more than an exhale, but sharp enough to shut Nyma up. She heard something—footsteps—and pushed the _Harbinger_ faster. The display lit up with warnings, alerting her than any higher power consumption ran the risk of outstripping the ship’s stealth capabilities.

She flicked it aside with a twist of her wrist and set a course for Rolo’s beacon.

The footsteps stopped, and an unfamiliar voice spoke.

“What the--?”

Rolo cursed, but whatever else he might have said was lost in a shuffle of movement. Nyma had the warehouse in her sights, and she dampened the power to the main lasers, ready to blast the roof off the place. She didn’t care much whether she caught the guards in the blast, but Rolo was still in there. Rolo was all that mattered. Even if she was discovered, even if she blew the whole job, even if she got herself shot out of the sky--

They were _not_ taking Rolo from her.

“Nyma!” Rolo cried suddenly. “Wait!”

Force of habit stayed her hand at Rolo’s words, bringing the _Harbinger_ up just short of the warehouse roofs, weapons primed but not yet fired. The stealth systems blared warnings at her from all sides, but none of them had actually failed—not quite.

“What’s going on in there?” she demanded, hands quivering with the need to act.

Rolo hesitated, then chuckled. “See for yourself,” he said as the roof retracted.

* * *

Nyma exited the _Harbinger_ warily, pistol in hand and leveled at the two Galra standing by the warehouse doors. They’d left Rolo a wide berth, and Nyma crossed to his side instantly, sparing him an appraising look. No obvious wounds.

“What is this?” she demanded. “Who are they?”

One of the Galra, a slender man with small ears and white streaks in his hair, held up his hands. “Peace,” he said. “We mean you no harm.”

His companion, a stocky woman half a head taller than him, crossed her arms with a snort. “Your friend’s vrekking lucky we didn’t take his head off when we caught him spying on us.”

“Spying?” Nyma arched an eyebrow, but didn’t correct them. The mission was probably bust at this point, but she wasn’t planning on blabbing their whole story to these people. Still, she’d seen the way their eyes widened when she stepped off the ship. “You were expecting Galra,” she guessed.

The pair kept their faces blank, but that didn’t mean anything. Their thoughts had gone to spies, not thieves. In the middle of a weapons depot. With a cloaked ship.

She smiled.

“You’re here for the weapons,” the man said, his eyes sharp. It was an odd look for a Galra’s blank stare, a glimmer of deep amber at the center of the eye, like a spark catching on tinder.

Nyma cocked her head to the side. “And you’re plotting treason. What, you take on some boring old inspection duty so you’d have somewhere private to talk?”

"Something like that,” said the man, smiling wryly. His companion just glared at Nyma, who responded with her most innocent smile.

“You said something about a Project Balmera.” Rolo flicked a spot of dirt off his stolen armor, hardly glancing at the Galra opposite him. “You wanna share with the class?”

The man frowned. “I think its best we all pretend none of us ever saw the others here.”

Rolo hummed, then pulled a thumb-sized scanner from his gauntlet. “Let’s see now… Lieutenant Commander Thace drul Vesely and Lieutenant Nadezda ve Drevahl.” Rolo looked up with a grin as the pair stiffened. “I’m sure the rest of your people would be just tickled to know what you’ve been up to.”

There was something thrilling about cornering Imperial soldiers, however risky a gambit it was. Adrenaline sang in Nyma’s blood even as she watched shock, then fear, flash through those hollow eyes.

The woman—Nadezda—burst out laughing. “Oh, I _like_ these two.” She clapped Thace on the back, seeming not to notice when he stumbled and winced, one hand reaching up to massage the shoulder she’d probably bruised with her slap. “Well then, here’s a little tidbit to whet your appetite. Project Balmera’s a pet project of the emperor. Even we aren’t authorized to know about it. You want answers, you’re only going to find them in the Hovent Sector.”

“Hovent Sector?” Rolo frowned. “Never heard of it.”

Nadezda tossed something at him, the act making Nyma tense. But it was just a data chip, almost too small to see. “Coordinates,” she said, earning a sharp frown from Thace. “I don’t know what you’ll find there, but I’ll bet my lover’s life whatever you find will be of keen interest to any enemy of Zarkon. You might turn a fair profit if you’re smart about it.”

The four of them traded looks, not so much trust as mutual respect. Thace and Nadezda backed toward the door, hands held up and away from their weapons to prove they were not a threat.

Nyma didn’t relax till they were gone, and even then she only holstered her pistol so she could get the antigrav modules and start loading their cargo. She and Rolo worked quickly, Nyma’s neck prickling all the while. She expected soldiers to come bursting through the door at any moment.

None came.

They were out of the hangar in record time, cloak still up. No one roused to stop them as they flew away from the depot.

Once they had a wormhole behind them, Rolo pulled out the datachip Nadezda had given them.

Nyma shot him a hard look. “You’d better be on your way to toss that in the incinerator.”

“You don’t even want to see what’s on it?”

“A trap, probably,” she said with a shrug. “It doesn’t concern us.”

But Rolo hesitated, turning the chip over in his hand. “You didn’t hear them, Nyma. The way they were talking before they spotted me? Whoever they are, they’re no friends of Zarkon.”

“And that means we can trust them?” Nyma demanded.

Beezer buzzed a profanity to show what he thought of the pair.

Rolo just sighed, sliding the chip into the _Harbinger’s_ computer. “We should at least look into--”

He fell silent as the datachip’s contents appeared onscreen. It was a simple holomap, a short list of notes in an overlapping window. Hovent Sector was marked out in red, a handful of uninhabited systems and one or two with primitive lifeforms. One of these was indicated as the base of operations for Project Balmera, but it was the note underneath that made Nyma’s breath stall in her lungs.

She looked up slowly, meeting Rolo’s eyes.

“Looks like we’ve got a new mission,” he said.

And for once, Nyma didn’t bother to argue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey all, and thanks as always for reading! Just wanted to give you guys a heads-up that I'm taking a brief hiatus on this fic. I'm moving in a couple weeks, and we have an entire apartment to pack up before then, so... yeah. Since next chapter starts a new major story arc that I'm NOT going to pause in the middle of, that means we're going to have an impromptu mid-season break right here. Sorry!
> 
> I'm hoping to be back with the next chapter on April 10th. It might get pushed back one more week if the move turns into more of an ordeal than I'm anticipating. If that happens, I'll post something on my tumblr (@squirenonny). My other ongoing weekly fic, _Handbook of Demonology_ will still update on its usual schedule.
> 
> In happier news, take a look at this wonderful fanart of [Keturah](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/158557337014/seamarmot-keturah-from-squirenonny-s-great) that Pechat drew! :D


	16. Battle for Kera (Part One)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Previously... After stopping by Olkarion and picking up Ryner, the second green paladin, Team Voltron took a bit of a breather. The non-tech-savvy team members and the Galra refugees are stepping up, taking on more duties so Hunk, Pidge, Matt, Ryner, and Coran can focus on decoding the secrets of Shiro's Galra tech arm.
> 
> Elsewhere in the universe, Rolo and Nyma (now running supplies for the Kera Sector rebellion) ran into Thace and Dez and received information about Project Balmera, in the Hovent Sector. Nyma's not sure she wants to get involved, but Rolo convinced her to check it out.
> 
> Meanwhile the Galra are converging on the Kera Sector, amassing an army to wipe out the rebels there. Commander Anamuri contacted Voltron to request aid.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for your patience as I went quiet for the last few weeks. I'm all moved in (though I don't have internet at the new place yet, which I guess means less distractions from writing? Even if I have to go to the library to upload the chapter.) Anyway, I'm back! And things are about to get intense. Enjoy!
> 
> Also, Pechat continues to spoil me by drawing all my OCs! You can now see all of the previous paladins: [Lealle](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/158270172299/seamarmot-lealle-from-squirenonny-s-great), [Keturah](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/158557337014/seamarmot-keturah-from-squirenonny-s-great), [Rukka](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/159050781284/seamarmot-rukka-from-squirenonny-s-great), and [Sa](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/159433534939/seamarmot-sa-from-squirenonny-s-great-duality). Thank you so much! They're perfect!

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #121  
>  Dated one and a half years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> The latest enhancements appear to be working well. All eleven test subjects given cybernetic enhancements powered by synthetic Q are healthy and stable, and have met or exceeded targets on all physical metrics. With the use of the current internal power systems, synthetic Q poisoning is minimized, and larger prosthetics can be produced without need for a Balmera crystal to power the device.
> 
> At this point in time, it is considered inadvisable for any individual to use more than two sQ enhancements, as contamination is not wholly unavoidable and excessive exposure may lead to physical degeneration. Commander Sendak has already claimed the privilege of receiving the first upgrades: a combat-ready prosthetic arm and a cybernetic eye. The procedure is scheduled for three days from now.

* * *

Pidge was trying to ignore the rainforest growing along one wall of the Green Lion’s hangar, but that was asking a lot. They swore they could _feel_ it growing there. Looming. _Watching_. Maybe it was just the way the thick leaves on shrubs already as tall as Pidge (even though Ryner had only been here six days) changed the lighting. The way the clatter of their keyboard didn’t echo around the chamber as much with the organic sound sponge clogging it up.

But Pidge had a sneaking suspicion that deepening their bond with Green—and temporarily sharing a mind with Ryner—had given them a connection to nature they’d never asked for and, frankly, didn’t want.

“You know, it might not be so intimidating if you didn’t try so hard to ignore it.”

Pidge whipped around at the sound of Ryner’s voice, and was almost insulted to find her kneeling beside one of the newer plants, a little fern-like thing with yellow and pink striped fronds. She seemed utterly unconcerned with Pidge’s discomfort (rational or otherwise), even going so far as to _hum_ to herself as she stroked the leaf, which seemed to stretch and whisper like a living thing.

Telling themself that plants _were_ alive and they should stop being so offended at the sight of a little greenery, Pidge shut their computer and turned their full attention on Ryner. “I’m not intimidated.”

Ryner’s antenna twitched, a motion that reminded Pidge somehow of a raised eyebrow, and they scowled.

“I’m _not_. I happen to _like_ the way I had this place set up before. Is that so wrong?”

Pidge knew they were being irrational. There was plenty of space in here for Ryner to have her garden without encroaching on Pidge’s work space. Everyone else seemed to share their lions just fine. (Though, to be fair, no one else but maybe Hunk spent as much time in the hangars as Pidge did, and Shay hadn’t _do_ _ne_ _anything_ to the hangar when she bonded with Yellow.)

It was just Pidge being defensive and hating change, as usual. They couldn’t _help_ it.

With a sigh, Ryner let go of her fern, plucked a pair of oblong blue fruits from a stumpy little tree, and offered one to Pidge as she sat on the edge of their table. “I know this is all very sudden.”

“It’s fine,” Pidge said automatically, staring down at the fruit. Hunk had practically cried when Ryner suggested she could grow actual fruits and vegetables in her garden— _real_ food, Hunk said. Not all this food goo and dried or canned goods that would last more than a day or two from the market where they’d found it. Real, fresh food, readily available whenever he had time to attempt something resembling a real meal.

Pidge shouldn’t have spent the last week searching the castle for somewhere _else_ to put the garden. A greenhouse, or an empty room close enough to the hangar to feel Green’s nature magic, which apparently helped the plants grow.

Ryner chewed her fruit in silence for a few seconds, but Pidge didn’t have much of an appetite. With Ryner now helping the rest of the team figure out Shiro’s arm, they were making progress again, figuring out bits and pieces of the magic Haggar had infused the machine with.

By all accounts, Pidge should have been happy.

They sighed, setting the fruit on the table beside their laptop, and looked up at Ryner. “It’s not _you,_ ” they said. “I’m just adjusting. I’ll be fine.”

Ryner hummed, nibbling at the last bit of flesh stuck to the pit. “You know, I was already an elder by Olkari standards when the Galra drove us from the city. Many of us had not seen such wilderness in our entire lives. I had not left the city myself since I was a child.”

Frowning, Pidge tried to figure out where Ryner was going with this. She was, in a lot of ways, like Coran. Both had a way of talking around things, tricking you into following them right to whatever point they were trying to make before you realized they were trying to make any point at all.

Of course, Coran usually tricked you with a joke, while Ryner just launched into some story about her childhood that Pidge honestly expected to one day turn into, _Back in my day we had to walk uphill to school—both ways! In the snow!_

Pidge couldn’t help it. Ryner had been the Eldest—a leader, yes, but also literally the oldest Olkari in her village. She had a grandmotherly atmosphere about her. One not helped by her preference for gardening over tinkering with actual machines. Pidge had been more than a little disappointed to discover that it _was_ a preference, rather than an unfortunate compromise Ryner had been forced to make in the absence of real tech.

At least Ryner hadn’t taken a leaf from Pidge’s grandma’s book and started lamenting the effects of technology on today’s youth.

“We were all a bit upset when our metals and circuits were taken away from us,” Ryner said, her eyes twinkling as she caught Pidge’s gaze. “We already knew it was possible for us to affect natural systems. Our ancestors were building great machines in the forest long before we turned our minds to computers.”

Pidge held up a hand. “Is this gonna be a lecture about how _the great outdoors is good for me_ and maybe I just need to _step away from the computer for a while and get some fresh air_? Because if so, I’m gonna save us both some time, turn on a sun lamp, open a window, and get back to my programming.”

Ryner actually laughed at that, which made Pidge relax despite themself. That was the worst part—they actually liked Ryner. She was smart and thoughtful, and she had a wicked sense of humor. She was old ( _really_ old, not that Pidge would ever say that aloud), and probably wouldn’t be fighting on the front lines any time soon, but she was dead even with Lance in target practice and she’d already cooked up a new thumb-sized explosive that would be beyond helpful in cracking open Galra strongholds.

Really, when Pidge stopped to consider that the pair of them had had less than two hours to get to know each other before they synced up, it was pretty amazing how well they fit. Green had chosen her second paladin well.

It was just the little things Pidge couldn’t seem to cope with. It was stupid and childish, and Pidge wanted to fast forward a couple weeks to when the newness had worn off and they could walk into the hangar without getting smacked in the face by the changes.

Ryner silently nudged the blue fruit closer to Pidge, and Pidge begrudgingly took it and bit into it. It tasted a little like a peach, which was the closest anything had come to genuine Earth food since they’d all come to the castle-ship. They wondered whether Ryner could tweak the flavor of her fruits.

“I’m not lecturing you, Pidge,” Ryner said. “All I was going to say is that I know how you feel. You know what I did the first night outside my city?”

“Built a fortress full of tree-bots to defend you, probably,” Pidge said around a mouthful of space peach.

Ryner’s antennae quivered in amusement. “I started a forest fire and sat up all night so I didn’t get dirt in my clothes.”

Pidge stared at her, shocked, and Ryner closed her fist around the blue fruit’s pit. “You’re joking.”

“I wish I was. It was new, and I hated it. It wasn’t like I’d had any say in the matter. I was just trying to make the best of a terrible situation. It took me a long time to admit the forest had any perks. It took even longer to accept that I’d come to love it even more than I’d loved the city.”

Ryner opened her fist. The pit appeared unchanged, but she nodded in satisfaction and went back to her garden and dropped the pit in a hole she’d made near the original tree.

“What’d you do to it?” Pidge asked, spinning their own fruit in their hand and trying to decide whether it was worth it to suck off the last bits of pulp.

“It was too sweet,” Ryner said. “I reprogrammed it a bit.”

Pidge furrowed their brow. “Reprogrammed?”

“Of course. All living things contain their own code.”

“You modify the DNA.” Maybe it shouldn’t have been such a big surprise, but it had all seemed so mystical Pidge had never really thought about the actual mechanism by which Ryner’s technopathy—florapathy?--worked.

Maybe that was why they’d been having so much trouble figuring out how to use the wooden circlet Ryner had brought along for them.

“Among other things,” Ryner said. “It’s faster to alter the plant’s physical state, but starting at the code gives us more room to work. And with the Green Lion here to speed up germination--” Green rumbled at this, making both her paladins smile. “Well, patience has its benefits. Besides, it makes this place feel a little more personal.”

She was right, of course. Maybe Pidge should stop trying to put up with the garden and learn to think of it as their own. They stared at the pit in their sticky hand for a long moment, then reached out for the circlet sitting on one corner of their work station.

_Step one: see if I can make a peach with the power of my mind._

It would be a better diversion than the Project Robeast logs, at least.

* * *

“Allura says--” Matt paused to hiss in pain, and Hunk heard Shay murmur an apology. “It’s fine. Allura say’s we’ll have to stay clear of the _Kera_ until the battle actually starts. She’s worried Voltron showing up will make the Galra forces panic and attack the people of the Kera Sector instead of concentrating on the rebellion.”

Hunk frowned at the section of Q-conduit he was working on. After the octopus-robeast on Maorel, Hunk had been going through shielding all of Yellow’s major systems. Actually shielding them, not snipping wires at a sprint to try to mitigate damage. Weapons that drained Quintessence were becoming something of a theme with Zarkon’s forces lately, and the constant drain had left Yellow raw and aching for several days after the battle.

The damage was fixed by now, but Hunk didn’t want to take any chances.

Besides, working on Yellow was good stress relief, even more so now that he could hear her singing to him as he worked.

“Did she tell Anamuri and them about the tracking device?” Hunk asked, carefully splicing in a new stretch of Q-conduit with a cap on the end. Snipped conduit tended to fray, which could impede the flow of Quintessence, so real shields had to be capped against wear.

“Not in so many words...”

Hunk pulled his hands away from the conduit and tilted his headlamp down to examine his work, though he hardly needed the extra light. His hands had a tendency to glow brightly wherever he touched his lion, the same way Shay’s did. The same way any Balmeran’s would when they were talking to their Balmera. Shay thought it might be an effect of their bond, which seemed a reasonable enough assumption.

Neither of them could guess whether the bond would also allow Hunk to talk to actual Balmera, or if it was exclusive to Yellow.

Hunk didn’t mind if it _was_ just a lion thing. He could hear Yellow’s voice now, like a teacher walking him through his repairs. Things that had eluded him even just a week ago now might as well have been diagrammed and labeled in plain English. It made repairs a snap, which left him more than enough time to refine and improve her systems.

“We’ve got another day. That means we still have a chance to find it, right?” Hunk asked, lingering inside Yellow even though he was done for the day. It was so much easier in her. Yellow was such a vast, steady presence that Hunk’s anxiety hardly made a ripple in her calm. But the effect only lasted while he was inside her, or near enough that he might as well have been.

Matt sighed. “I suppose.”

“You did say Ryner’s help was invaluable, did you not?” Shay’s voice was cautious, and Hunk couldn’t blame her. She didn’t understand the technical side of Hunk and Matt’s work on Shiro’s arm, but she could hardly miss the way they all tensed when the subject came up.

Hunk scooted toward the access hatch and dropped to the ground. His shoulders tensed as soon as he slipped out of Yellow’s protective bubble, and he gritted his teeth as the all-too-familiar weight settled back into place.

Matt lay face-down on the floor, his head pillowed on his arms. Shay knelt over him, running through the usual routine—drawing out crystals, dissolving them, shifting them away from nerves and internal organs. She’d been hesitant to carry out the healing here, rather than in the med bay, but Matt had pleaded a case of cabin fever and—when that won only a perplexed frown from Shay and a pronouncement that his temperature was perfectly normal for a human—said he wanted to talk to Hunk about their work on Shiro’s prosthetic.

“She _is_ a big help, no doubt,” Hunk said, using a rag to wipe grease from his hands. His hair was probably a mess, if Matt’s crooked smile was anything to go by, but he didn’t much care. “We’re making tons of progress understanding how the Quintessence works.”

Matt muttered something under his breath, but Hunk only caught the phrase _friggin’ self-charging battery_ before a crystal split the skin of his back and he bit down on his wadded up shirt to keep from crying out.

Hunk winced and turned back to Yellow, trying to look like he was fixing something on her hull and not simply trying not to watch as his partner pulled lumps of rock out of his friend’s body.

After hearing Ryner describe the Quintessence in Shiro’s arm—slick, almost unnatural—Pidge had suggested it was the synthetic Quintessence they’d been reading about in the logs from Maorel. That was the problem. Ryner worked with living things, but she was no expert on Quintessence. Coran, as an Altean, was more familiar with Quintessence, but not in this capacity. And none of them knew how synthetic Q worked.

It was like digging through a yard full of leaves looking for the one and only leaf that had come from a maple instead of an elm.

A shock ran through him at that, and it took him a moment to realize it had come from Yellow. Her song beat quick against his fingers, urgency making his heart race. She seemed to want to tell him something, something about Shiro. Something his idle thoughts about raking leaves had triggered…

Hunk closed his eyes, letting Yellow sweep him up. The song contained no words, so the only way to understand was to let yourself be wrapped up in it.

Wrapped up in it he was. The hangar around him faded, Shay and Matt’s voices dimming to distant stars. Hunk was inside Yellow, and he watched himself walk out of the hangar, head up the elevator to the bridge, linger there a while, then leave for the kitchens, for the rec room, for the paladins’ quarters. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t feel him the way she could when they were close, but she sensed him out there, connected to him as if by a string. He felt like a piece of herself.

“Hunk?”

Hunk startled awake, his hand slipping from Yellow’s hull. Shay seemed to have finished her work on Matt, who wriggled into his shirt, grimacing as he gently rolled his shoulder. Shay stood nearer to Hunk, frowning.

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine. No—better than fine.” Hunk patted Yellow’s side, trying to translate his gratitude and pride into that song. He wasn’t very practiced at it yet, but Yellow seemed to understand. “Either of you know where Shiro is?”

* * *

“I don’t understand why you don’t just _talk_ to them.”

Shiro flinched at Keith’s words and nearly missed the sword swinging for his neck. He caught it at the last second, but it was too late to keep Keith from seeing his slip. The sword retreated. Keith stepped back, breathing just a little harder than normal.

If they’d been sparring in earnest, Shiro knew, Keith’s sword would have found its mark. Shiro was slow—too slow for someone expecting a call to battle at any moment. He’d been sleeping poorly lately, his dreams tangled up in thoughts of what could happen if Haggar decided to go on the offensive. If she got close enough to take him over.

Matt didn’t know about the dreams; Shiro had done his best to hide his inner turmoil from the rest of the team. They didn’t know what would happen if Shiro lost control. No one did, except Keith, which was why Shiro had been avoiding him lately. It wasn’t fair to Keith, but Shiro couldn’t face his pity.

Well, no. It wasn’t pity in Keith’s eyes. He didn’t often pity anyone, and certainly not Shiro. It was guilt, and concern, but also a challenge.

“I can’t, Keith,” Shiro said shortly, and charged back into their duel, hoping the match would distract Keith from his questions.

He parried Shiro’s first strike, turned his sword in a way that sent Shiro stumbling. (A rookie mistake; Shiro would have smacked himself if he hadn’t been so out of sorts.) Rather than follow up on the opening, though, Keith just stepped back again.

“You’re tearing yourself apart, Shiro.”

“I’m fine.”

Shiro found his balance and launched into another attack. He saw the moment Keith’s patience ran out. Keith stepped forward to meet Shiro’s attack, interrupting Shiro’s swing. Sword met arm and stalled for a moment. Then Keith pivoted, ducking under Shiro’s arm. He hooked his foot around Shiro’s ankle, and before Shiro could blink, he found himself on the ground, Keith’s knee pressing against his back.

“I _know_ you feel guilty, Shiro,” Keith said.

“I don’t--”

“Don’t lie, Shiro. I saw you on Yaltin.” Keith’s words stopped the protest on Shiro’s tongue, and he stilled, no longer fighting against Keith’s weight. Keith paused, then slowly rolled off him. “You blame yourself for everything.”

Shiro sat up, frowning at him. “Not everything. Only the things I should have been able to stop.”

Keith gave him a sidelong look, which Shiro ignored. “There was nothing you could have done.”

“Are we talking about Yaltin? Or Maorel?”

“I don’t know. Both? Shiro--”

Shiro waved him off. “I know, Keith,” he said. “I know. I know this is all Haggar’s fault. I know I’m not the one who destroyed Yaltin, or turned all those prisoners into mindless monsters. I _know_.” He stared down at his hands—one flesh, one metal. The seam between the prosthetic and the stump on his arm ached, and Shiro didn’t know whether to be angry that the two were permanently fused together or glad he didn’t have the option of looking to see what damage had been done. He’d seen Matt’s notes on the prosthetic. He knew the socket—the metal casing above his elbow, which covered a good six inches of his stump—contained something vaguely reminiscent of cryo-pod tech.

The human body wasn’t supposed to have a hunk of metal fused to it, but Haggar didn’t care about the damage her weapon did to the rest of him. Easier to patch up the damage it did than build something that worked right in the first place.

But wasn’t Shiro just the same? He wasn’t doing good in the universe so much as trying to patch up ten-thousand-year-old wounds. Sometimes he brought healing, sometimes he only wrought more destruction. Neither was good enough for a paladin of Voltron.

There was blood on his hands. Innocent blood. It didn’t matter who had shoved them into the Arena with him.

Keith crouched nearby, his ears flicking irritably, his lip pulled back in a snarl. He opened his mouth to say something, but the overhead comms crackled to life.

“Hey, Shiro!” Matt’s voice called, humming with energy. “I don’t know where you are, and I’m not searching this entire ship, so just get your butt up to the rec room, okay?”

Shiro arched an eyebrow at Keith, who shrugged. “I guess we’re going to the rec room, then,” Shiro muttered, and tried not to wince at the ache in his arm as he pushed himself to his feet.

* * *

It took ten minutes, which was ten minutes longer than Hunk wanted to wait, but eventually they were all gathered in the rec room: Pidge and Ryner, coated in dirt up to their elbows; Matt and Coran, looking on with interest from one of the couches; Shiro, still sweaty sparring with Keith.

Keith and Shay lingered at the back of the group. Neither of them were technically-minded enough to follow the conversation, but all Hunk had had to say was that he thought he knew how to find the tracker, and both had been hooked.

“It was Yellow who gave me the idea,” Hunk explained, sitting across from Shiro as he tried to put it into words. “The lions know where we are, even if we’re a long way away. That’s how Blue was able to find Lance inside the lab on Maorel.”

“Red and Green did the same thing on Arus,” Pidge said. “Matt and I were out scouting the wreckage of Sendak’s warship when the first robeast attacked. Our lions came all the way from the castle to protect us.”

“And on Vel-17,” Matt added quietly.

Coran nodded thoughtfully. “That’s true. A paladin’s bond with their lion works on many levels, even drawing you back toward your lion if you’re separated.”

“Right.” Hunk pointed at Coran with the pen he’d been twirling between his fingers. “But do you know how that works, on a practical level?”

Humming, Coran tapped his chin. “Can’t say I’ve every really thought about it. Your Quintessence—”

“Exactly!” Hunk was buzzing with hope and fear—hope that he’d actually figured this out, and fear that he’d missed the mark again. It built up together in his chest until he could hardly force himself to sit still. “When I first bonded with Yellow, she left a little piece of her Quintessence in me. At least—I think that’s what it was. That’s what the bond _is._  I have a little bit of her in me, so I can use her systems, and she always knows where I am.”

Shiro stiffened, breathing in sharply. “You think that’s how Haggar’s tracking me?”

“Coran or Ryner will have to confirm it, but it makes sense. We haven’t been able to find an actual structure in there that looks like a tracking device, and Pidge hasn’t found anything in the code. But if it’s literally the Quintessence that she’s following--”

Coran leaned forward, laying one hand over Shiro’s prosthetic. Hunk scooted aside as Coran reached for Shiro’s left arm, and Matt scooted closer beside Shiro, propping his chin on Shiro’s shoulder.

“The Quintessence is definitely different,” he said. “I can’t say for sure that it’s connected to something larger...”

“It’s definitely possible, though,” said Ryner. “We do something similar on Olkarion. I always know exactly where I left one of my creations.”

Pidge tapped their chin, watching as Coran turned Shiro’s prosthetic over, muttering to himself as he traced the edges of a metal panel. “I’ll be right back,” they said, and darted out of the room.

Hunk watched them go, drumming his fingers on his knees.

“Let’s assume you’re right,” Keith said. He hadn’t moved from his spot by the door, near Shay, but went on staring at the ground, his arms folded across his chest. “If that is how Haggar’s tracking him, then what?”

“Easy,” said Hunk. “We drain all the Quintessence out of the arm and give it a new power source. Haggar can’t track what’s not there.”

Matt beamed, wrapping his arms around Shiro’s waist. Shiro reached down with his left hand, which Coran had abandoned in favor of scrutinizing the prosthetic, and squeezed Matt’s arm. “It’s that simple?”

Hunk hesitated. “Well, I mean. We’ve been wondering for a while if there’s some kind of code or hormones or something in the Quintessence that helps the arm function. If there is, I’m not sure whether draining the Quintessence will mess that up, but...”

“Even if it does, I’m no worse off than if we hadn’t tried this,” Shiro said. “We’d have had to do _something_ before we head to Kera, and right now our only other choice is to shut it down manually, right?”

Ryner nodded. “Besides, if it _is_ something like an endocrine system, this prosthetic must create and destroy those hormones constantly. As long as the biological tissue remains intact—and we supply it with the new Quintessence quickly enough to avoid tissue death—it should be able to recover.”

Pidge rushed back into the room, the head of a Galra sentry cradled in their arms. Hunk recoiled at the sight of it, its eyes glowing pink. “Uhh, Pidge...”

“I was trying to extract information,” Pidge said dismissively. “Which turned out to be useless. They aren’t hooked up to the main network; they’ve got their own server that runs their orders, and we destroyed this one’s server when we blew up the ship.”

They set the head down on Ryner’s lap, eyes shining.

“There’s still Quintessence in this. Synthetic Q.”

Ryner sat up straighter, placing her hands over Pidge’s on the sentry head.

Hunk frowned at them both. “What?” he asked. “What does that mean?”

“Synthetic Q is manufactured,” Pidge said. “It’s all standard. There’s no signature, or if there is, it’s everywhere in the Galra Empire. It’s _useless_ for tracking.”

“But if the Quintessence in Shiro’s arm is different, that means Haggar put something else in.” Ryner narrowed her eyes. “Something more expensive. Something she couldn’t mass-produce.”

“There would have to be a reason for it,” Coran said.

He glanced at Ryner, then reached one hand out for the sentry head she still held at the same moment she reached over to wrap her long fingers around Shiro’s wrist. Both closed their eyes for a long moment, then nodded.

“It’s different,” Ryner said.

Coran turned to Hunk, beaming. “Looks like you were right, Yellow.”

Hunk could have melted then and there, but he was quickly caught up in a flurry of activity. They still had to figure out how to drain the Quintessence from Shiro’s arm, and how to power it up again afterward. Matt was the one who suggested using the crystals Shay had extracted from his body—“They’re perfectly happy drinking up every other kind of Quintessence I come in contact with.”—and Pidge fished out the power cell from their robot head and waved it in the air.

“If we can figure out how to get this in there, it should be compatible.”

Two hours later, it was done. Matt’s crystals had swelled to three times their size, leaving Shiro’s arm deadweight on the table in the infirmary, where they’d all moved to work. Pidge, Ryner, and Shay managed to coax the synthetic Q into its liquid form, then found a syringe they could maneuver through the meat of Shiro’s prosthetic to the rod at the center—now hollow—that had held Haggar’s Quintessence before.

It took the power cells from two more decapitated sentries, but eventually they sat back as Shiro tested the speed and flexibility of his arm. He activated its weaponized mode and traded a few cautious blows with Keith, then grinned.

“I can hardly tell the difference,” he said. “Now all that’s left is to see whether or not Haggar can still track me.”

Coran clapped him on the back. “I’m sure you’ve got nothing to worry about,” he said, waving the swollen crystals over his head. “I’m going to go dump this mess out the airlock. Why don’t you all go tell Lance and Allura the good news?”

* * *

Lance stood on the bridge with Allura, keeping her company during her shift watching the long-range scanners. She, Tev, and Zelka had set up a rotation to keep watch so Coran didn’t have to worry about it. He had enough on his plate helping out the other engineers with their projects, Allura said. He didn’t need to be taking on even more duties.

Normally they let the castle’s AI monitor most things, but they were being extra careful since Anamuri’s call for help had come in. An army gathering just outside an inhabited star system was bad news, and Allura didn’t want to risk them all being caught flat-footed if Zarkon moved faster than they expected.

But it got lonely up here all alone for hours, and Lance didn’t have anything else going on right now. He wasn’t a tech genius like Hunk or Matt, but this much he could do.

“I was talking to your mom the other day,” he said, keeping his voice bright, but watching Allura for signs of distress. This wasn’t the first time they’d talked about Lealle—Allura had as many fun stories about her mom as Lealle had about her daughter—but he knew the pain still floated close to the surface. Some days talking about it was just too much. “She was telling me about when you trained with Blue. The moons of...Sirjet or something?”

Allura’s eyes lit up. “With the gnerullian sludge? I was cleaning that out of my hair for a _month_!”

Lance leaned his elbows on the console and grinned. “Yeah, Blue got kinda uppity when I mentioned it. Lealle thought it was pretty funny, though.”

Wrinkling her nose, Allura swiped through a few automatic checks, then turned away from the screen. “Her and Meri both. You’d think we’d spent the day at a spa instead of wading through sludge to find the brand new pfeffervar array Sa had just attached.” She paused, hunching her shoulders. “I _still_ say he shouldn’t have put on her belly. _Far_ to easy to dislodge it down there.”

“The Greens really need to be more practical about their evil scientist inventions,” Lance said, nodding sagely, and Allura laughed. Lance hopped up on the console, kicking his legs in the air. He pretended not to notice when Allura arched an eyebrow at him, just went on kicking until Allura sighed and sat beside him, her feet tucked primly underneath the edge of the console. “Who’s Meri?”

Allura’s smile turned sad. “She was my best friend—more than a friend.”

Lance studied her, noting the furrow of her brow, the way she'd caught her bottom lip between her teeth. "More than a friend as in... family? Or were you two...?"

"I'm not sure. We never really had the time to figure out what we were. But I cared for her, deeply. And I knew her--as much as she trained with my mother, I saw her more than I saw anyone but my father."

“She was training? To be a paladin?”

Allura nodded. “She flew Blue after my mother died. Just for a few days, not even long enough for them to settle into the bond. She could have been the blue paladin, though. Whatever she said.”

The ache of Allura’s loss lodged in Lance’s chest, and he squeezed her hand. “Could have been?”

“She _was_ the blue paladin,” Allura said. “As far as I’m concerned. But Meri said it wasn’t a true bond. We were at war, and we didn’t have the luxury of searching for a replacement. Most of the other trainees had already fled. Meri said… She seemed to think Blue had only chosen her because she had to. That their bond was forced, and it would die as soon as the emergency passed.”

“Blue’s not like that,” Lance said.

Allura smiled. “No. She and her paladins are incredibly loyal. I don’t think Blue would have given Meri up for anything, emergency or no. I don’t think Meri ever realized that, though.”

“These things don’t happen overnight.”

Allura cocked her head to one side in a silent question.

Lance scratched the back of his neck, laughing self-consciously. “Something a friend once told me. She was like that, always teaching me little things that I didn't realize until later were actually really good things to know. She always used to tell me that relationships don’t happen overnight. They take work. Like building a castle. Or a castle-ship,” he added with a grin. “Sure, you can build a sandcastle in a day. Maybe even a really impressive one. But what’s the good of that if it just gets washed out to sea?” He paused. “I’ll bet Blue and Meri would’ve gotten there if they’d had a little more time.”

“Me too,” said Allura.

They were silent for a while, and Lance let his legs slow until they hung motionless over the edge of the console. “She doesn’t have an AI.”

“She didn’t have time to build a memory profile. Something like that takes years.”

There was something profoundly sad about that, Lance thought. He still wasn’t sure what he thought about the AIs, even after talking to Lealle for hours upon hours. As a way to talk to people he otherwise wouldn’t have known, to get to know even that small piece of Allura’s mom, it was great.

He wasn’t sure he’d feel the same way if it was _his_ mom. Or Hunk. Or anyone else.

But would it be better than losing them entirely? He’d had the thought that it might be a good idea for the new paladins to create memory profiles. He’d been meaning to ask Allura about it, actually, though he kept getting distracted and forgetting to mention it. If it took years, though, was there even a point? Lance wasn’t ready to face the possibility that he’d still be fighting this war a couple of years from now.

Before he could decide what to do about it, the bridge doors opened and the rest of the paladins came tumbling in with a chorus of laughter and overlapping conversation.

Allura hopped down, but the automatic concern on her face faded as Shiro pushed his way through the group, his smile brighter than Lance had seen it in a long while.

“This looks like good news,” Lance said, kicking his legs again. He stayed where he was, searching the grinning faces for signs of… whatever it was that had just changed.

Shiro reached out to ruffle Hunk’s hair, and Hunk blushed scarlet, his smile growing even wider.

“Hunk found the tracking device in Shiro’s arm,” Pidge said. Their steps slowed. “Well, I guess _device_ isn’t the right word. Tracking energy?”

“The point _is,_ ” Keith interjected. “It’s gone.”

Lance barely contained a shout of joy. “Way to go, Hunk!”

Something in Allura’s posture had relaxed, and she bumped her shoulder against Shiro’s, beaming at him and then at Matt, who was practically bouncing beside him. “What a relief. Was it tied to the override?”

Shiro’s smile faltered, though he caught himself before the mood could slip too much. “Hard to say. Best to assume no for now, though.”

“Yeah.” Hunk scratched his chin. “I don’t know the first thing about how this override is supposed to work. It _could_ have been in the Quintessence, I suppose, but...”

“Well, she’s gonna have a hard time _finding_ him now,” Matt said. “So the override’s a lot less of a threat even if it is still there.”

Shiro nodded. “And the rest of you aren’t in as much danger, which is what really matters.”

Lance snorted derisively—and he wasn’t the only one. Keith was rolling his eyes, Pidge had blown a raspberry, and Matt was groaning loudly (and at great length) directly into Shiro’s ear. Allura waited for them all to finish their nonverbal sounds of indignation before she crossed her arms and said, “Well, I think we’ll all rest better knowing you’re that much safer.”

Shiro looked caught between smiling and sighing, and the glint in Allura’s eyes said she knew it.

* * *

Shiro insisted on testing his new-found freedom from Haggar’s watchful eye. (Not, of course that he doubted Hunk or any of the others, he just didn’t want to take any chances where the Kera Rebellion was involved.) So he and Allura took the Black Lion out for a run against an isolated warship.

Lance stood on the castle-ship’s bridge with Coran, watching nervously, but the mini-mission went off without a hitch. No reinforcements, no robeasts. The warship hardly had time to scramble its fighters before the fight was over.

Shiro was riding high on exhilaration when he and Allura returned, and they hailed Anamuri to let her know they’d be joining the _Hope of Kera_ soon.

Commander Anamuri wasn’t the only one waiting when the paladins disembarked. A yellow-furred alien named Fi, whom Lance now recognized as a Piraxan—like Sa, the last green paladin—greeted Coran with a hug that almost made the Altean disappear in his fluff, and Coran returned it with enough gusto to lift Fi off his feet.

A little feathered dinosaur of a girl shrieked Pidge’s name at the same moment, tackling them backwards onto the ramp—and very nearly made Matt trip over his own sibling.

The girl—Jeya—babbled out an apology, chirped a hello to Ryner as Pidge introduced her, then fluttered out a series of overexcited gestures toward the far side of the hangar where Coran had landed their shuttle. Ryner slowed to pay Anamuri proper respects, but the other two sprinted off and vanished into a pile of spare parts.

Hunk chuckled as they went, but stuck close to Allura and Shiro as they greeted Anamuri.

“It’s wonderful to finally meet you in person, Princess Allura,” Anamuri said. Lance had seen her once or twice when she and Allura talked about the ongoing war, but alien Skype didn’t fully convey the mole-like appearance of the rebellion leader. She was short and hunched, with long yellow claws that brushed the ground and an elongated snout. Only her solid green eyes and her gold-edged blue scales kept her from looking like an actual mole.

Lance put the thought out of his head. She was a high-ranking officer, and an ally. He needed to show some respect.

“Likewise,” said Allura with a small bow. “We are honored to join you in the upcoming battle. Together, we can show Zarkon that we are not a force to be trifled with.”

Anamuri smiled, her nose quivering. “Indeed. All here remember the feats accomplished by just two paladins when they were here before.” She tipped her head toward Hunk, who flushed, smiling sheepishly. “We are eager to see what wonders you can achieve with your entire team present. But come.” She turned, her small guard force moving with her. “We have much to discuss before the battle begins.”

Shiro glanced over his shoulder at the paladins who hadn’t immediately scattered. (Pidge cackled from the scrap pile in a way Lance found more than a little disturbing.) “Why don’t you all take some time to relax? We’ll meet back here in a few hours to go over our part of the battle plan.”

Lance, who had already taken two steps after Anamuri, stopped. Disappointment flickered through him, chased by an embarrassed blush. Of course he wasn’t going to be part of the big leader brainstorming session—Shiro and Allura had the whole tactical thing in hand, even without Anamuri’s strategists.

The meeting would probably be boring anyway.

Lance forced a smile and affected disinterest as Shiro and Allura left with Anamuri, then sighed and surveyed the hangar. “What the heck does he expect us to do?” he muttered. “Twiddle our thumbs? Sing campfire songs? I don’t suppose this ship has Netflix.”

Matt laughed, elbowing Lance in the side. “It’s gonna be, like, twenty minutes. Just relax.”

“Relax.” Lance arched an eyebrow, caught Matt’s gaze, then looked pointedly over Matt’s shoulder at Keith, who was stiffer than an over-starched shirt, his ears twitching like they wanted to lay flat against his head. He had his arms crossed over his chest, and he glared at a group of mechanics—who were minding their own business on the far side of the hangar—like he expected them to start a fight.

To Lance’s surprise, Matt’s hackles rose at the sight of Keith. He shot a wary look at the mechanics, then drifted over to Keith and enticed him into a conversation about the _Hope of Kera--_ apparently a custom ship with some interesting modifications. Keith relaxed a little, letting Matt lead him to a row of stools at a work table along the wall, but Matt himself stayed tense. Lance almost would have called it protectiveness except that there was no reason for it.

Lance turned to ask Hunk about it, only to realize that he’d wandered off—with Shay—to talk to the mechanics who had spooked Keith. Lance glanced over at Pidge, still fully engrossed in the scrap heap with Ryner and Jeya. It looked like the three of them were halfway through building a robot already, and Pidge shrieked with delight as Jeya lifted something that looked like a dented horseshoe.

It struck him, suddenly, that in a castle full of dual paladins, he was the odd man out. Sure, he could easily join any of the groups—well. Maybe not Pidge’s, not if he didn’t want to risk getting his fingers blown off. But Hunk would never turn Lance away, and given the way Keith still darted looks around the hangar, a little extra distraction over there wouldn’t be unwelcome.

It just… stung. It was that moment in Tactical Basics when the instructor announced pair projects and Lance looked around, only to realize everyone else but him had already paired off. It was one part disappointment, one part jealousy—not so much a fear of being left out as a leaden knowledge that he was going to be a third wheel wherever he went.

Being the last one picked sucked, even when— _especially_ when _—_ you didn’t even know who it was doing the picking.

* * *

_Garrison Three Abducted by Aliens! No Comment from the Galaxy Garrison_

Karen stared at the headline, her blood boiling. The article—pure nonsensical ramblings—was posted on some small-time conspiracy news site, nestled between a supposed Loch Ness Monster sighting and a _Flashback: Fifty Years of Polybius_ featurette. It was the sort of place Karen never would have given the time of day, except that someone had posted a link to this article on Eli’s website, along with a sardonic comment about “the Truth.”

“I _told_ you not to click the link,” Eli said in a sing-song from the kitchen. Karen could barely see him there, working on lunch. His sister Lana and her wife were arriving today, and he’d declared it an occasion worthy of a big, home-cooked meal.

Karen wasn’t exactly clear on how that differed from the things he normally cooked.

She growled in frustration and closed the webpage, clicking with rather more force than necessary. Akira looked up from the book he was reading as she stood and crossed to the kitchen, still fuming.

“Have you heard from Naomi recently?”

Eli arched an eyebrow, though he barely glanced up from his work. “No. Why? You don’t think she’s the one spreading the alien thing.”

Karen nearly opened her mouth to say yes, but controlled herself just in time. “No,” she said. “She doesn’t have _time_ to be talking to those kinds of rumor mongers.” With a huff, she grabbed a glass from the cupboard and filled it at the sink. “You can’t blame me for being pissed, though.”

“Because there’s no such thing as aliens?” Eli said dryly. She might have said there was no such thing as children, the way his voice dripped with amusement.

“No,” Karen said. “Because the more people spread baseless stories like this, the harder it’s going to be for us to get anyone to believe us.”

“Not going to be a problem, Karen,” Akira said from the living room.

She frowned, turning toward him. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t hear?” Akira set his book aside, then stood and came toward the kitchen. His stride wasn’t as tentative as it had been a week earlier, his ankle almost fully healed. His shoulder still needed time, but he wasn’t hiding his pain nearly as often, which Karen took as a good sign.

He was grinning as he stopped to lean against the door frame.

“There was a demonstration yesterday.”

Karen raised her eyebrow. “What?”

“That’s right.” Eli tapped his wooden spoon on the edge of the pan, his face lighting up. “I meant to say something, Karen. Must’ve slipped my mind. It wasn’t a big one, as far as demonstrations go, but after Iverson’s last press release, something like—what was it, Akira? A hundred people?”

“Hundred and fifty.”

Eli nodded. “They turned up on the Garrison’s doorsteps to demand the truth. I hear a certain former flight instructor’s name came up more than once.”

Chuckling, Akira rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. “I’m sure Iverson’s _thrilled_ about that.”

Karen leaned back against the counter and took a long drink of water. She’d seen the press release, of course. A week of silence following Akira’s video, and when Iverson finally spoke it was to say that Akira was no longer employed by the Galaxy Garrison following “an incident involving a firearm discharged inside a dormitory building” and that his words should be given no credence.

The fact that the negative response had come so quick gave Karen a savage flash of pleasure. She just hoped the demonstrations didn’t escalate too far. She held no illusions about the amount of force Iverson would be willing to leverage to silence the opposition if given even the slightest justification.

Eli’s phone began to ring, and he quickly foisted the spoon off on Karen, who stared at the simmering sauce hesitantly. “What exactly are you expecting me to do here?” she asked.

Eli just shushed her as he answered his phone. “Hey, Lana. Getting close?” He paused, blinking, and shot a glance at Karen. “Oh.” Another pause. “No, no. That’s… I’m sure there’s plenty of food. Yeah. Okay. See you soon.”

He hung up and reclaimed his spoon, shooing Karen away from the stove. She watched him, scowling, and when he didn’t immediately explain, she crossed her arms. “What was that about?”

“Nothing,” he said. He looked up. Stirred his sauce. “Lana and Akani are about ten minutes out.”

“We having guests?” Akira asked.

“Well…”

“Eli.”

Eli cringed, then nodded. “I guess Akani reached out to the Mendozas after we talked last week.” The bottom dropped out of Karen’s stomach as she remembered her last, disastrous conversation with Val’s mother. Eli was watching her now, his face pinched with sympathy. “Sounds like Carmen and her husband are ready to talk.”

* * *

There was no time to prepare. Karen had already cleaned the house in anticipation of Lana and Akani’s arrival, already showered and done her makeup—a self-defense tactic as much as a tool geared toward making a good first impression. Eli had dinner well in hand, and Akira seemed more eager to watch the fireworks than to help douse the inevitable flames.

Before she knew it, the doorbell was ringing. Karen caught herself stalling, as though hoping one of the others would answer it.

As soon as she realized what she was doing, of course, she shook the panicked thoughts free. She was a grown woman, a lion in the courtroom, and she would not be cowed because one near-stranger hated her. (Besides, Eli and Akira were offering her no outs on this one.)

With a deep breath, Karen opened the door.

Three women and a man stood on the front steps. The tallish, plump one—Akani, Eli’s sister-in-law, if Karen remembered correctly—hung at the back of the group, nearly as nervous as Karen and far less practiced at hiding it. The woman holding her hand would be Lana, then. Taller than the rest of the group and stubborn-faced, Lana looked like she was ready to shove Karen and Carmen into a closet if that’s what it took to get them talking.

Karen wished she knew why the Kahale women had decided to go meddling in this, of all things.

But it was Carmen, dark curls tied back in a loose bun, her hand white-knuckled as she gripped her husband’s arm, who captured Karen’s attention. They’d shared only one brief conversation, but it was a memorable one. The long and short of it was Carmen blamed Karen for Val’s disappearance.

Karen found she couldn’t fault the other woman for that.

“I’m sorry,” Karen said, which struck her as a poor way to start a conversation, but she needed to clear the air. “I shouldn’t have waited as long as I did to talk to you.”

The set of Carmen’s shoulders eased, and she glanced at her husband. “My daughter was a very willful woman. I cannot blame you for what happened to her.”

Their eyes locked, and Karen breathed out the bulk of her unease on a heavy sigh. There were still grudges between them, grudges of the sort that couldn’t be healed in a day, but Carmen was extending an olive branch, and Karen was more than happy to accept it. After all, everyone here was in the same boat. Everyone here had lost a family member to Iverson’s schemes.

Karen stepped aside and gestured the other four into the house. “Dinner’s almost ready. We can talk after we eat.”

* * *

The alert came early the next morning. Lance was asleep when the sirens started blaring, but they’d all been expecting this. Though anxiety had kept him up later than he might have liked, he snapped wide awake at the first peep and was in his armor on his way to Blue by the time Coran reached the bridge and started calling the paladins to action.

Only the first few warships had emerged by the time Lance and Blue spilled out of the hangar. The violet wormhole was still open, gunners and fighters and a few more warships sliding out. The Black Lion was already among them, and Red caught up to Lance about the time the first wave hit. Lance had just enough time to spot Green and Yellow coming from the castle-ship, and a slew of rebel fighters and larger ships trickling out of the _Kera_ in tight formation.

In the next breath Lance was surrounded, too busy shooting down the enemy to pay attention to what everyone else was doing.

He felt a tug on his subconscious from Allura even as she cried, “Paladins, now! Form Voltron!”

Lance had been expecting the order. At the briefing last night, Shiro had explained that they would form Voltron early in the battle, try to take out as many ships as possible while they were still clustered around the wormhole. Once the fleet scattered, they would need to separate to cover more ground.

This first part was the easy bit. Lance plunged headfirst into the bond.

* * *

Nine minds tangled together, some wearing familiar tracks, some still trying to find their way. Shay’s song focused them, Shiro and Allura guided them. Hunk’s awareness reverberated throughout Voltron’s body as interlocks engaged and everything snapped into focus.

From the Green Lion’s cockpit came a new awareness, a net cast wide across the stars. Little burning flames where living things passed. It was not an awareness as the black paladins were aware of their team—more accurate to say it was the open maw of a carnivorous plant, tasting the air for prey, waiting for the right moment to spring the trap.

A great deal of life still waited just beyond the wormhole’s open wound.

Anticipation simmered in the bond, and protectiveness, and purpose. Somewhere beneath it all, nearly lost in the harmonies, was a single discordant note of uncertainty, but this was quickly snuffed out as the paladins turned their minds toward the battle.

“Hunk!” Shiro called. “Shoulder canon!”

Hunk plugged in his bayard, and the canon settled into place atop Voltron’s shoulder. For an instant they surveyed the battlefield. Pidge and Ryner sensed the lives of the Kera rebels in their ships, intangibly different from the overwhelming number of Galra.

But Anamuri had told her people to stick to the perimeter of the battle as long as Voltron was in play. It was too easy for men to be crushed underfoot when a god danced among the stars.

Matt’s dry amusement rose to the forefront at the thought, and Keith’s disdain. Shiro quelled them, looking out through the eyes of his lion as the Galra forces resolved into squadrons and chose their targets.

When the shoulder canon released its first blast, an entire wave of fighters and no fewer than a dozen gunships turned to vapor, blazing bright in the darkness for the briefest instant. Chaos followed quickly on the heels of devastation, fighters breaking formation. Some turned toward Voltron, identifying it as the greatest threat in the area and falling back on old, familiar patterns.

“We’ve got their attention now,” Keith said, one corner of his mouth quirking up in a smile. He knew what was coming. The sentries were programmed to swarm the primary threat, sacrificing themselves in the hope that one would get lucky. More than a few of the Galra-operated ships adopted the same strategy, a cloud of gnats nipping at Voltron’s heels.

Hunk unleashed again with his cannon, and then a third time.

A chasm opened up in the swell of ships, and Voltron flew through, letting their cannon dissolve in a flicker of light. “Form sword!” Shiro called, and Matt complied eagerly.

A warship—the _Sniper,_ Keith thought—was just emerging from the wormhole, it’s main cannon already glowing with an unnatural acid green light. Voltron sliced it in two, then hurled the bow at the nearest warship. Both ships crumbled, and the vital glow of life within them dimmed sharply.

One of the first warships to have arrived turned its cannon on Voltron then, unleashing a laser that consumed more than a few of the Galra’s own fighters as it sped toward Voltron. Pidge activated their shield and caught the blast, defiance ringing through the bond as the force of the blast threatened to push them back.

Yellow and Blue pivoted, and Red brought the sword down on another warship as it emerged.

Ryner called out a warning, and the others spotted the _Hunter_ flying dead-out toward the _Hope of Kera._ Voltron turned to give chase, but the _Hunter_ was already readying its cannon.

A panel opened on the dashboard of the Green Lion. Ryner’s eyes widened. Pidge laughed aloud. “Aw, yeah,” they muttered. “Our turn!” They roared as they plugged in their bayard and turned, and the shield burst apart into a million bits of stardust that shimmered in the shape of a shield for one endless instant.

The light condensed, racing outward from the Green Lion’s mouth like a spark devouring a fuse. The energy coiled around itself, long and lithe and bright enough to sear the paladins’ eyes. It was a whip, coursing with energy like the tether of Pidge’s weapon, and it ended in a vicious-looking burr with six-foot metal spikes protruding in all directions.

Voltron drew back, then flicked their wrist, and the whip snaked out toward the _Hunter_. Metal melted where the whip’s fall coiled around the hull; the burr buried itself in the ship's engines with a squeal of shattering crystal.

Another flick yanked the _Hunter_ backwards, and Voltron spun, Red falling on the helpless ship like an executioner with her sword, destroying the bridge in a single swipe.

For a time the battle passed much the same, sword disabling ships as they emerged from the wormhole, whip snaring those who tried to flee and pulling them back within Red’s reach. Occasionally Shiro or Allura would call for the shoulder cannon again, and they would clear out the swarm of support ships too agile to fall to the sword and whip.

A second wormhole appeared on the far side of the _Hope of Kera_ , then a third nearly at the edge of the system. Voltron surveyed the battlefield, and then Shiro gave the order: “Back to Lions. Everyone spread out. Keep those ships away from the _Kera_.”

“And let us know if they attempt a run on any of the planets,” Allura added. “We all know Zarkon likes to play dirty.”

With a chorus of agreement, the paladins split apart.

* * *

With the battle in full-swing, there wasn’t much time to discuss. The lions dove into the fighting wherever it was thickest—Red sprinting to the farther of the two new wormholes and lighting up the sky with waves of crimson fire; Black and Yellow tag-teaming the other new wormhole. Whenever Lance’s viewscreen turned that direction, he spotted ripples in his field of view: Black’s gravity breath, or tractor beam, or whatever it was. She’d draw the enemy in close, then take them out with her jaw blade while Hunk focused all his firepower on the warships.

Lance, Pidge, and Ryner stayed near the original wormhole. With the lasers flying thick and fast, Green’s shield got a near-endless charge, so the sky around her was alight with lightning, flashing and crackling. Lance gave Green plenty of space.

And it wasn’t like Lance wasn’t doing his fair share of the fighting. He had his lasers, and he had his ice breath, and Blue was hands down the best Lion of the lot.

But the others all had their second halves, and Lance could see the difference without even trying. The others were all faster than him, except maybe Yellow; Pidge and Ryner kept beating Lance to the punch whenever he spotted trouble brewing. Red had her back-mounted cannon, and Yellow had Hunk to instantly repair any damage she took, and Green probably had a million surprises up her sleeve (paw? Whatever.)

And of course Black. Between Shiro and Allura, Black was the most prepared of all of them. Nothing caught them by surprise. Lance was pretty sure they could have torn through a regular fleet all by themselves.

So, sure, Lance was doing pretty well. Just by virtue of piloting a Voltron Lion, he was doing more good than any of the rebel fighters. But next to his friends, well, it was hard not to feel just a little bit inferior.

The flow of ships through the wormholes had slowed to near-nothing. Lance couldn’t honestly say they’d made a dent in the forces—sure, they’d cut down half a dozen warships as Voltron, and Black and Yellow for sure had taken out another one—but the Galra were still swarming everywhere. Rebellion fighters were going down faster than Lance could track, the castle-ship’s shields were flashing red, and three warships had converged on the _Kera._

Lance opened his mouth to let Shiro and Allura know the _Kera_ needed backup, but Keith was faster:

“Shit! Guys, some of the ships are breaking off toward the planets. I have to--”

He fell silent as Pidge yelped. Lance wheeled around and found himself face-to-face with the biggest ship he’d seen yet. Two or three times the size of the biggest warship, it dwarfed the rest of the fleet.

Pidge, on their visual feed, was grinning. “That’s the command ship,” they said. Hunk moaned dismally in the background. “How much you wanna bet hacking that thing brings down all the sentries in the system?”

“Pidge.” Shiro spoke like he was about to contradict Pidge’s plan, but he stopped, then sighed, and Allura took over.

“Do it, Pidge.”

The Green Lion bobbed something that might have been a nod, then turned and sped toward the command ship.

“Lance,” Shiro said. “Watch their back.”

“Right.” Lance followed the Green Lion, shooting down any ships that got too close.

“Hunk, Shay,” Allura said. “Go help Keith. We _cannot_ allow Zarkon to involve the people of this system in our battle.”

Lance spun Blue in a tight circle, freezing enemies in a wide arc around him. “Okay, but uh… is anyone gonna help the _Kera_? She looks like she’s in rough shape.”

“We’ll handle that,” Shiro said. “You just take care of Pidge and Ryner.”

Lance didn’t notice the reinforcements right away.

The battle was chaotic enough already, and the second fleet had wormholed in all the way at the far end of the solar system, just a swarm of tiny little gnats that were impossible to see among the stars. Blue registered them, but there were about a dozen things flagged with more urgency—like the gunship trying to turn her into a big blue ball of spacedust, and the swarms of fighters trying to force Green and Ryner back from the command ship, where Pidge was silently making their way through the belly of the beast in search of the main sentry controls.

Lance and Blue danced through the battle, picking off enemy fighters where they could, avoiding the worst of the retaliatory lasers. He couldn’t afford to be taken out of this fight. None of them could.

He was hyperfocused on the Galra in his immediate vicinity (and on making sure they didn’t become more of a nuisance than they already were), so the second fleet was already to the farther of the three inhabited planets in the system before Lance spotted them.

It was while he was looping around, trying to get behind a squadron that had been hugging his tail for the last five minutes, that he spotted explosions in the far distance. At first, he couldn’t figure out what they were. The battle didn’t reach that far, last he’d checked. Had one of the others broken off to chase down a fleeing ship?

_No._

Realization numbed Lance, and the Blue Lion slowed just slightly. Just enough for her pursuers to land a solid hit to her hindquarters. Lance was thrown against his restraints, swearing as he tucked tail and flipped over, greeting his opponents with a face full of ice.

“Guys!” he called, breaking off toward the next problem standing between him and the new arrivals. “Problem out at—ah, shit, what’s it called? Trivia? One of the inhabited planets.”

“Trenvila?” Keith asked.

Lance flipped a hand dismissively as he shot between two gunners, blasting them both with his tail laser as he passed. “Sure, that. The one with people on it. It’s under attack.”

Shiro didn’t swear, but Lance thought it was a close thing. “Just what we need. Look, Lance. Red and Yellow are still tied up at their planet, and Pidge needs backup inside the command ship. I need to get Allura on that ship, and then I’ll come help with Trenvila. You’re gonna have to try to distract that fleet until then.”

 _Distract._ The word hit Lance like a slap. Not like he was capable of doing any real damage, right? But he tamped down on the thought and nodded. “Got it.” An ice blast immobilized the ships around him, and he gave Blue a burst of speed, breaking through to the edge of the battle and streaking across open space toward Trenvila. A few squadrons of rebel fighters had already split off from the main fleet, though Lance quickly overtook them.

His stomach dropped as he neared the battle. The fleet here wasn’t as big as the main one back with the other paladins, but it was nothing to scoff at. A command ship even bigger than the one Pidge had infiltrated, two assault ships—nearly as strong as a standard warship, but smaller and not as heavily armored—a dozen gunships, and way too many fighters to count.

Lance steeled himself for a fight, then dove into the fray.


	17. Battle for Kera (Part Two)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Just when everyone thought they might never figure out the secrets Haggar had hidden in Shiro's arm, Hunk and the Yellow Lion unearthed the mechanism by which Haggar has been tracking Shiro: her own Quintessence, powering Shiro's arm. Switching out Haggar's Quintessence for synthetic Q seems to have solved that problem, so the team headed to the Kera Sector to help Anamuri, Jeya, and the other rebels fend off the Galra army massing in the area.
> 
> The battle went well at first, but then the Galra started attacking on multiple fronts, forcing the paladins to split up. Red and Yellow are defending one of the system's inhabited planets, Pidge has infiltrated the command ship in an attempt to disrupt the sentries' programming, and Lance is out at the outermost inhabited planet distracting the reinforcements until Shiro can come help.

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #130  
>  Dated one and a half years before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Prisoners 013-9872, 014-9872, and 015-9872, collectively denoted as the “Ziva,” have been test subjects in the Project Robeast initiative for half of a standard year, but they show little promise. sQ enhancements continue to function as expected:
> 
>  -- 013’s robotic arms retain full motor functionality, though they continue to lose dexterity as the subject’s physical health deteriorates
> 
>  -- 014’s cybernetic eyes have been failing periodically, perhaps due to nervous tissue atrophy (a rare symptom of synthetic Q poisoning)
> 
>  -- 015’s dermal-neural network appears to have fully overshadowed the subject’s native nervous system, leading to the disappearance of aversive responses to pain stimuli
> 
> However, unlike other subjects, a slower introduction to synthetic Q does not appear to have enhanced the Ziva’s technopathy beyond typical levels. Necrosis has progressed to the point that further tests might render the subjects unusable. Further escalation is not recommended.

* * *

Allura spread her mind across the battlefield. Hunk and Shay were serving as a one-lion shield for the planet Berylis, their tension a restless creature at the edge of Allura’s awareness. Matt and Keith were with them, cutting through ships with a cold, ruthless efficiency. Ryner was holding her own—barely—at the heart of the main battle, trying to stay close to the command ship to extract Pidge when they were finished. More distantly, she saw Lance charging into battle with a laser blast to the bridge of the newly-arrived warship. The shield stopped the attack from finding its mark, but Blue hit with so much ferocity the shield wavered under the onslaught.

But Allura’s mind, mostly, was on Pidge. They’d made it several levels deep into the command ship, but they hadn’t found a central computer yet, and they’d run into trouble in the form of guards. Apparently the Galra were used to the paladins’ infiltrations by now and had set up more comprehensive security protocols.

Shiro cut down the last line of fighters and blasted a hole in the command ship’s underbelly. Allura fixed Pidge’s location in her mind, then stepped away from the controls. Her connection to her team faded as she did so, and for a moment she felt blind.

Then the Black Lion swung in close to the ship, and Shiro put her head through the new opening in the hull. Allura charged toward the ramp and leaped out, firing her jet pack to carry her toward the nearest intact airlock. “I’m on board the command ship, Pidge,” she said. “I’ll be there in a tick.”

Pidge grunted. Allura could hear lasers somewhere nearby. “Great,” they said. “I’ll just be here. Trying not to die.”

Allura found half a dozen sentries waiting for her on the other side of the airlock, and she took them out with a savage sort of pleasure. No one and nothing was going to stand between her and Pidge. Not now.

She ran, staff in hand, cutting down enemy soldiers when they stood in her path, but never slowing long enough to finish those who didn’t drop with the first blow. She needed a clear path, nothing more. Pidge kept up a string of constant chatter in the background—insults and taunts slung at their attackers, half-hearted jokes for the other paladins.

Less than a minute after boarding the ship, Allura heard the sound of lasers ahead of her. She rounded the corner, took in the situation at a glance. Pidge was backed into a nook in the wall beside what looked like a water fountain, crouched down behind their shield as eight Galra bombarded them with lasers. The shield was in bad shape, riddled with small cracks, one of its four main panels flickering on the verge of giving out.

Allura roared a challenge, startling all but two of the Galra into forgetting about Pidge, rounding instead on her. She summoned her shield, shifted into a Balmeran body, and charged, crushing a sentry against the wall and lashing out with her staff. She caught a guard in the head and he went down, rifle spinning away from him. Allura didn’t stop to see where it ended up. Her next strike took two guards out at the legs, and then she had to duck behind her shield as three of the remaining four guards opened fire.

Pidge charged into the distraction, their bayard flashing green lightning as it lashed two soldiers together and jolted them until they stopped moving. Allura grabbed the last two sentries and smashed their heads together.

The hallway fell still, and Allura turned toward Pidge, wiping her brow as she reverted to her normal body. “Well that was exciting.”

Pidge rolled their eyes. “Shut up and help me find the control room.”

* * *

Keith grimaced as the Yellow Lion took another hit. “You guys okay in there?”

Hunk gave a noncommital grunt, but Shay offered Keith a smile. “Our lion is strong, and Hunk is managing. We will be fine.”

“Though, I mean, the quicker we end this, the better,” Hunk said. His voice echoed oddly, and Keith guessed he was neck-deep in some system or another, trying to keep Yellow afloat as Shay intercepted any attack the Galra fleet launched toward the planet below.

Through Matt’s eyes, Keith spotted a gunship trying to sneak up on the Red Lion, and they wheeled around, unleashing a wave of fire that turned the ship into a misshapen metal lump.

“Just hang tight,” Matt said. “You’re doing great.”

He and Keith, on the other hand, were having a little trouble. Red was fast, and she was strong, but they could only work so fast. Dozens of ships had broken away from the main fleet to attack this planet—Berylis, Keith thought it was called.

Well, it might have been more accurate to say the Galra fleet was holding Berylis hostage. There were enough of them that they could have simply spread out and unleashed on the planet, and two lions wouldn’t have physically been able to stop every ship at once. But they hadn’t done that. The fleet stayed close together, the gunships firing at the planet just often enough to keep the Yellow Lion out of the fight; fighters breaking off in squadrons every so often and forcing Red to chase after them.

It was less that the army cared about civilian casualties and more that the continued feints toward Berylis kept the paladins on the defensive, opening them up to attacks from the bulk of the fleet, which was completely ignoring the easy target.

 _They’re toying with us,_ Keith thought, and he felt Matt’s answering disgust.

“Guess we’re just gonna have to step up our game,” Matt said.

Keith grinned, adjusting his grip on Red’s controls. She roared as her pilots urged her faster, weaving between ships. They had their jaw blade out to bisect any ship they passed, and Matt manned the tail cannon controls to pick off more. A squadron of fighters broke for the atmosphere, and Keith chased after them, engulfing them in flame even as he tucked and rolled, and Matt opened fire with both Red’s main lasers at the warship at the center of the assault.

It reeled from the hit, and though its shields held, they were faltering. One or two more hits like that and the warship would be down for the count.

The rest of the fleet had closed ranks by now, swarming toward the Red Lion to give the warship time to recover. That was fine. Keith and Matt would tear through them all. They were paladins, after all. They were untouchable.

* * *

Lance played the distraction.

He hated it, hated that he had to do it, but there were too many Galra ships out by Trenvila, and Blue flat-out could not take that much damage. So he ran, and he hid, and he picked off fighters and gunships where he could, and occasionally slowed to hammer at the assault ships' shield, and he kept a corner of his mind on the main battle, praying Shiro would get here soon.

The rebel fighters were doing much the same, their numbers slowly dwindling as the battle wore on. A few of them were outfitted with bigger guns, which Lance was pretty sure Pidge had called pulsers or something. These ships led the charge, taking out Galra fighters by the handful, but Lance was the only one who could take out the gunships in one hit--and the only one who could hurt the assault ships at all.

But the command ship was the main issue; Lance didn’t have any weapons big enough to damage the engines or the weapons or the bridge. Not through that shield. He could chip away at the ship’s underbelly, but that wasn’t going to do him much good—especially as long as the support ships were still there to flank him.

Blue nudged him through their bond, bringing up a panel bearing the BLIP-tech controls.

“You trying to tell me something, beautiful?” Lance asked, swerving out of the way of a gunship’s attack before turning his attention to the panel. He tapped the button to run a scan, then managed to shatter one of the assault ships' shield while the scan ran. The rebel fighters swarmed the wounded assault ship, shredding the engines, weapons, and bridge. Just two gunners and one assault ship left, plus the command ship, plus about a bajillion fighters.

Eh, it was progress.

Lance glanced at the scan results—and looked again, frowning. “What the…?”

“Everything all right?” Shiro asked.

Lance shook his head. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine, just...” He trailed off, staring at the display. It showed the command ship, lit up with hundreds of little pinpricks to represent the lifeforms on board. Most of them were Galra, but…

Before Lance could lift a hand to try to filter out the Galra vital signatures, Blue did it for him, and most of the dots disappeared.

Most of them.

There was still a cluster of life signs near the back of the ship, way down in the belly, where there wasn’t all that extra reinforcement. He couldn’t tell how many there were—dozens, maybe; they were all stacked on top of each other until it looked like one big, blue blob. As Lance stared, the screen glitched, and a few of the dots reappeared a few rooms down, or up a level, or--

The screen glitched again, and all the dots were back in that same spot in the ship's gut.

“Lance?” Shiro called, a note of worry creeping into his voice. “Keep talking to me, Lance. What’s happening?”

“Prisoners,” Lance said, feeling numb. “There are prisoners on this ship.”

A new alert popped up, and Lance stopped breathing.

_Species analysis._

There was a big flashing banner beneath this heading that said the results were inconclusive—too many life signs too close together, according to Blue—but she’d given him her best guess. He didn’t recognize most of the species on the list, but the one at the top he definitely, _definitely_ did.

Altean.

There were _Alteans_ on that ship.

 _But that’s impossible,_ Lance thought, numb. It had to be some kind of glitch. A false positive. A--

“Lance, hold your position. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Shiro’s voice snapped Lance out of his thoughts. The sharp, inflexible tone cut deep. _Hold your position. Distract the enemy._ Oh, sure, _Pidge_ could infiltrate a Galra ship by themself, no problem. But Lance? No way. He should just _wait_. He needed backup.

Lance gripped Blue’s controls so tight his knuckles began to ache, struggling for calm. Shiro didn’t mean anything by it. Allura had gone in to help Pidge, hadn’t she? And Yellow and Red were tag-teaming the situation over by Berylis, weren’t they? Everyone needed backup. Shiro would have been just as worried if it was Keith and Matt out here with the prisoners.

Wouldn’t he?

“Fine,” Lance said, forcing a cheer he didn’t feel. “But hurry it up, would ya? They haven’t gone after the planet yet, but I want to get those prisoners off before we have to blow the ship.”

“Of course.” Shiro met Lance’s eyes across the comms feed, though he soon had to refocus on the battle around him. “I’m on my way.”

* * *

“Zelka!” Coran cried. “I need more power to the particle barrier!”

“Yes, sir,” Zelka barked, already calling up a new screen at her bridge station, her hands flying across the controls. A few paces away, Tev whooped and crowed as he bombarded the enemy with a steady stream of lasers.

Coran wished the battle was going as well as Tev’s hollers made it seem. Certainly he was tearing into the Galra fleet, cutting through gunships and hammering warship shields with an enthusiasm Coran knew was just a facade. Underneath he was grim—fully committed to this strike against the army that had imprisoned him on Revinor, but no more eager for the violence of war than any of the rest of them.

But he’d already managed to shatter three warships’ shields, leaving them vulnerable to the lions and to the more heavily armed of Anamuri’s ships.

If only the castle-ship hadn’t taken so much damage. Coran had initially tried to keep them out of the line of fire, but as more and more ships poured into the system, that became impossible. He’d shifted now to monitoring the flow of battle and coordinating with Anamuri, calling out targets for Tev to hit and redirecting Zelka to the most critical damage and every now and again jumping in to help out one or the other of them.

“Zelka?” Coran asked, as another laser blast shook them. The shields flashed red in warning, but Zelka’s face, when she turned toward him, was grim.

“I’m afraid there’s not much more power to redirect, Commander,” she said. “Auxiliary power is already going to our defenses. Without cutting off our own life support, the only options we have are shutting off the weapons systems or the main engine.”

“Then shut down the engine. This isn’t a battle we get to run from.”

Zelka nodded, her face a professional mask. Coran couldn’t say whether or not she agreed with the order, but she obeyed, and a moment later the shield stabilized, the schematics turning from mostly red to only _partly_ red.

An icon on Coran’s screen flashed blue with an incoming message from the residential deck. Grimacing, Coran accepted the message. “How’s it going, Zuza?” he asked.

“Fine.” The young woman hesitated, glancing to the side as one of the children started to wail. “Ish.”

Coran closed his eyes briefly, but a proximity alarm forced him to take manual control of one of the defensive drones and shoot down a pair of Galra fighters trying to slip in under the radar. He’d forgotten what it was like to have civilians on the castle-ship. Back when it had just been him, he’d been able to take risks with the particle barrier—but not now. The refugees gathered fifteen stories below were scared enough as it was; Coran couldn’t justify putting their lives at risk.

Zuza was still watching, her big eyes unblinking, and Coran shot her a frown. “Was there a reason you called?”

“Oh. Right.” Zuza pointed a finger at him and flexed her thumb in the ‘finger gun’ gesture Lance was so fond of. “It sounds like things are going… less than great up there.”

“You could say that.”

“Great!” She paused, deflating. “Well, no. Kind of the opposite. Either way, I was wondering if you could patch me through to the external visuals.”

Coran wasn’t sure why she’d want something like that, but one of Anamuri’s heavy hitters was being bullied by a Galra gunship, Tev was busy hammering a pair of warships trying to catch the castle between them, and none of the paladins were close enough to help. So Coran patched Zuza’s feed through to the bridge visuals and rushed to redirect the defensive drones toward the offending gunship.

Zuza clapped once, laughing in delight. “I _knew_ it! I knew there was no way Zarkon could put together an army this size without cutting corners! Coran. Some of those ships are from the ninety-two-hundred line.”

“The what?”

“An older model of warship,” Zelka said. “Came out when I was still in training. They’ve mostly been retired by now, or redirected to non-military patrols.”

Zuza grinned. “Ah, but do you know _why_ they were decommissioned?”

“I would imagine something better came along,” Coran said, distracted. “Zarkon’s fleet must have seen a lot of changes in the last ten thousand years.”

Huffing, Zuza crossed her arms on the comms station she’d commandeered down on the residential deck. “Okay, see, _this_ is why it’s stupid of Zarkon to seal the records of all his military defeats. How’re people supposed to _learn_ if you just keep pretending everything was perfect all the time forever? I mean, what’s Zarkon afraid of? That his commanders are gonna look at the past and say, _oh, sure, he’s conquered most of the known universe, but his engineers made a mistake this_ one time _. Guess that means we have to defect!_ ”

Coran exchanged a fleeting glance with Zelka, who appeared to be resisting the urge to sigh. “I don't mean to rush you here, Zuza, but if you're trying to make a point, I’d appreciate skipping ahead.”

“Oh. Right.” Zuza coughed into her hand, then yelped as the castle took another blast that made her stumble against the wall. “The ninety-two-hundreds,” she said. “The ones with those ugly little nubs on the front of them? Yeah, their SRAs are a _little_ bit, uh, overly-sympathetic.”

Coran wasn’t certain what an SRA was—but Zelka obviously did. She sat bolt upright, shooting a look at Tev, who was practically giddy with disbelief.

“Please tell me that means what I think it means,” he said.

Coran frowned. “Sorry, what are we talking about?”

“SRAs,” Zelka said. “The part of a ship that generates a wormhole.”

“And makes sure no one accidentally opens a wormhole inside your ship,” Tev added. “ _Zuza_. Can we open wormholes inside these ships.”

Zuza grinned. “That’s the best part—you don’t have to! Once the SRAs sense a big enough flux in the local gravitational field, they automatically create a wormhole.”

Her excitement was contagious; Zelka had already turned to bring the teludav back online. Coran glanced her way, then turned back to Zuza. “Just to be clear, you’re saying we can force these ships to retreat.”

“We can force _part_ of those ships to retreat.” Zuza’s eyes glimmered mischievously. “Turns out auto-SRA discharges aren’t big enough for a whole warship. The fleet sent to conquer the Havlian System found that out the hard way. One of ‘em got in the way of its buddy’s wormhole, people down below saw what happened… Long story short, it was the worst military disaster in the last thousand years, and Zarkon tried _real_ hard to hush it up. But he doesn't have a lot of extra military vessels floating around, so he had to do _something_ to put together a fleet this size. Old ships with a secret weakness were better than no army at all, right? Guess he figured you guys were too new to the war to remember anything about the SRAs.”

“And you know about it because...?”

“Because my uncle had irresponsibly high clearance ratings on his personal account, and slapping _restricted_ on a history archive makes it a _million_ times more interesting to a bored nine-year-old?”

Coran chuckled. “Well, we’ll have to make sure to thank your uncle for this. Zelka, are we ready?”

“Just about, sir. Tev, I’m gonna have to pull the power from the weapons systems for this.”

Tev flashed a thumbs-up, and Coran nodded once more to Zuza before switching back to the main channel. “Paladins!” he called. “I’m going to need a bit of back-up here for a bit. We’re going weapons-dark for a tick to prepare a surprise for those warships.”

“As much as I’d love to help,” Matt said, his voice strained, “we’re a little tied up over here. Rather not leave this planet to the Galra.”

“Same here,” Lance said.

Shiro made an unhappy sound. “That only leaves me and Ryner. Can you hold out for a few more minutes, Lance?”

“Pfft. Yeah, of course. No problem, Shiro, I _got_ this.”

“Right. Ryner.”

“On my way,” Ryner said.

Shiro nodded. “Pidge, Allura, just hold tight. We’ll be back for you as soon as we can.”

“No worries,” said Pidge. “We’re still a few levels from the nerve center, anyway. Take all the time you need.”

Coran waited for Shiro and Ryner to get in position near the castle-ship, ready to take on any Galra that might think to take advantage of the castle while they were switching over to their secret weapons, then signaled for Zelka to restore power to the teludav.

Coran stood at the command station—what he’d once always thought of as Alfor’s station and still sometimes found himself thinking of as Allura’s. He placed his hands on the twin pedestals as the screens blinked a message at him. _Standby. Standby. Standby._

_Ready._

Coran closed his eyes, gathering his Quintessence. Zuza said they wouldn’t need a large wormhole to trigger the ninety-two-hundreds' glaring mechanical flaw, so he focused instead on precision, trying to place his gateway at the very center of the ship he had in his sights.

He pushed his Quintessence into the castle-ship to start the teludav cascade, maintaining his laser focus on the target until he felt the castle respond, burrowing through from his target to a bit of empty space where the Galra couldn’t do any harm.

The teludav hadn’t even completed its discharge before the sky lit up in shades of swirling red, an unstable wormhole blossoming from the warship’s core. It flashed out of existence an instant later, leaving the bow and stern of the ship drifting free. The center—including the shield generator, engines, and most of the weapons—had vanished.

“What the--?” Shiro began. “Coran, was that _you_?”

Laughing, Coran turned his eyes to his next target. “It was. And I’m about to turn the rest of this fleet into spare parts!”

This was going to be so _very_ satisfying.

* * *

Lance was going to wait for Shiro. He _was_. A couple minutes probably wouldn’t make a difference, and it _was_ smarter to have backup for a rescue mission.

Then Coran had called for backup, and Shiro had to go help, and just a few minutes after that, the comms started to crackle with interference, like somehow Lance was drifting out past the transmission’s maximum range.

Still he held his position—it would probably be a _bad_ idea to get himself trapped when he couldn’t call for backup. But he’d cleared out all the gunships by now, and most of the fighters, and the second assault ship was  a one more good hit away from losing shields. The only real threat left was the command ship, and they couldn’t take that out until they had the prisoners safely evacuated.

A squadron of rebel ships sped toward them from the direction of the main battle, catching a disorganized knot of Galra fighters by surprise and leaving nothing but scrap metal in their wake. Blue roared, and Lance with her, and they shattered the last assault ship's shields with a laser blast that left Lance's ears ringing.

Together with the rebels, they made short work of the ship, and then there was only one thing left to do.

“Shiro?” Lance called. “Shiro, I’m going in after those prisoners. You’ll just have to catch up to me when you can, okay? …Shiro?”

No answer. Lance switched over to a local channel and tried to hail the rebel ships helping him out with the fight.

“Hey, anyone have radio contact with the rest of our people?”

Nothing.

Dread shivered through Lance, and his eyes darted to the BLIP-tech readout. Alteans. Allura and Coran would be devastated if he didn’t get them out of there, and with his comms all jammed up like this, there was no telling how long it would be before Anamuri’s folks decided to take out the warship. Did they even know there were prisoners? Lance couldn’t remember if he’d been on the open frequency when he told Shiro.

He couldn’t wait.

Lance breathed in once, deeply, then activated Blue’s cloaking device and headed down toward the source of the prisoners’ vital signature.

They were being held close to the midline of the ship, a few floors up from the bottom, which meant Lance was going to have to navigate inside the ship a little bit, but really. How many guards were there gonna be in the middle of battle? Everybody was probably manning the lasers or outside the ship in the fighters. This was gonna be a piece of cake—as long as he was in and out before Blue’s cloak wore off. And as long as there weren’t so many prisoners he couldn’t fit them all in his lion.

It would be fine. Even all clustered together like that, there probably weren’t _that_ many signatures. Two dozen, tops. He could fit that many in Blue’s cockpit, if he needed to. It wouldn’t be _comfortable_ , but they could deal with some close quarters long enough to get back to the castle-ship. Totally.

Lance’s nerves were alive with restless energy as he disembarked in an empty storage room of some kind. Blue having punched a hole straight through the hull, there was no real airlock here, so Lance had to sprint through the door, sealing it behind him as quickly as he could. His armor still measured a noticeable drop in pressure in the hallway on the other side, so Lance waited till he’d passed through three more doors before releasing the seal on his helmet.

“Okay,” he muttered, hefting his rifle and glancing around the room he found himself in—what might have been a med bay, though it wasn’t currently in use. Beds filled the center of the room, unfamiliar machines lined up next to each. The far wall housed a handful of cryopods, all dark. “You can do this, Lance. Just… get to the prisoners, get out, get back to the castle. Easy.”

He brought up the BLIP-tech scans on the display inside his visor, blinking a few times to bring the image into focus. The cluster of vital signatures was just where it had been before—one floor up from his current location, and a little ways deeper.

He headed out of the med bay in search of an elevator, tensed for a fight at every turn. But he found no one between him and the elevator. Weird. Maybe they didn’t use this floor at all.

But there was no one on the floor above, either, and the closer Lance got to the prisoners, the more he felt like he was missing something.

 _Get to the prisoners,_ he told himself. _Get out. Get back to the castle._

If the Galra didn’t care about watching their prisoners, that wasn’t _Lance’s_ problem.

He was almost on top of the cluster now, but there was a wall in the way, and Lance had to take a major detour in search of a door. He turned a corner, and was met with another long stretch of hallway, the wall on the left unbroken by any door. At the next corner, Lance turned again, and again found no way in. In less than two minutes, he’d made a complete circuit of the room, and he was still stuck outside.

“What, do they throw the prisoners down a hole from above?” Lance muttered, kicking the wall. He checked the scan again, and his eye caught on a lone dot not far from his current location. It had been flickering on and off since Blue first finished her scan, but unlike the other glitches, this one always showed up in the same spot.

As long as he was on this level, he might as well check it out.

Halfway there, he stopped, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end. There had been a sound, almost too soft to hear, a rustle, almost a whine. It sounded like…

Like Pidge’s bayard.

Lance flattened himself against the wall an instant before forked lightning flashed past him, so bright it left a silvery-green streak across his vision. The worst part of it was the sound, a horrible shriek that set Lance’s teeth on edge, and a crack of thunder loud enough to make his ears ache.

He spun, opening fire before his watering eyes had even found the enemy, and the rasping laughter told him he’d missed his mark.

“The blue paladin,” said a voice, dry and brittle like old bones. “How predictable.”

Lance blinked furiously, but when his vision cleared, he almost wished he hadn’t. A druid stood before him—but not just any druid. She was wiry for a Galra, her indigo skin furless, and long white hair framed a face half-hidden by a deep hood.

Lance had never seen her in person, but he’d spent enough time mind-linked with the others, either in battle as Voltron or in training using the mind-meld, to recognize this witch.

“Haggar,” he said.

She grinned. “So you already know who I am. Good. Saves me the _time_.” She struck toward him with one hand on the last word, and another bolt of lightning streaked toward him. Lance swore, threw himself aside, then turned and ran before she had a chance to try a third time.

* * *

It seemed to take forever to reach the central command hub, though Pidge knew it couldn’t have been more then twenty minutes. Seemed like longer when they kept running into Galra around every other corner. It was lucky Allura was there—not because Pidge couldn’t have taken on the guards themself, because they totally could have.

It was just that they were exhausted, and without Allura it would’ve taken longer and been more work, and Pidge might have had to curl up in the computer room for a quick nap before they were able to focus on the hacking.

“How much longer, Pi--” Allura broke off with a grunt and a crack of metal limbs against imitation stone wall.

Okay, so there were other reasons to be glad Allura was here. Like the fact that there was a veritable sea of Galra just outside this room, all of them pressing in for a shot at the black paladin. She’d adopted a new shift, a big, green, T-rex looking species that nearly filled the doorway with her bulk. It must have been tougher than Galra or Balmerans, Allura’s two usual battle shifts, because Pidge was under no illusions about the sheer number of hits Allura had taken since Pidge plugged in.

“I’m working on it, Allura,” Pidge said. “But the firewalls on this beacon are complete overkill.” They paused to direct Rover to run another passkey rotation; the layers so far had more or less alternated between security they could bypass with the proper clearance and defensive programs that did _not_ like being approached from an unfamiliar terminal. “Makes sense, I guess. Not like they wanna take the chance someone’s gonna commandeer two thirds of their army. Still damn annoying.”

Allura just grunted in response, and a sentry’s severed head came flying backwards into the room, narrowly missing Pidge’s gauntlet, which housed the holoscreen projector and digital keyboard.

“Hey! Watch the sensitive equipment here!” the protested.

The next severed limb, a few seconds later, bounced off the back of Pidge’s helmet.

They yelped, rubbed their head, and stuck their tongue out at Allura’s back. “ _Thank_ you.”

Rover chirped a confirmation, and Pidge dove into the next layer. They _had_ to be getting close. How many programs had they already hamstringed? Like, twelve?

“Overkill,” they muttered. “Compete and utter overkill.”

A flash of red caught the corner of their vision, and they grimaced, squinting against the light. It was just bright enough to divide their attention—attention they _really_ needed to break this damn security system—and moving erratically, like…

Pidge froze, head snapping up, then shouted an alarm and dove behind a bank of computers just as a laser erupted from the vents and burned a hole in the floor where they’d been sitting.

“What was that?” Allura demanded, her feet slipping as she wrestled three sentries back toward the corridor.

Pidge was already summoning their bayard. “Company in the vents!” they cried. “I’m taking care of it.”

They charged toward the air vent the shot had come from—one of two in the room, and Pidge was _positive_ they were both too small for any Galra to fit through. Another laser shot toward their head, but they were ready for it, twisting their shield to catch the attack. They fired their bayard as they approached, punching through the metal grate, and when they retracted the tether, the blade caught on the remnants and pulled the entire vent cover off.

Pidge ducted the flying grate, then leaped for the vent, which was situated a good three feet above their head. A little boost from their jet pack got them high enough to grab the edge of the vent with one hand, and they hauled themself up.

A drone, not unlike Rover, was speeding down the air duct. Pidge brought their bayard around and fired, skewering the drone straight through its power core.

The drone crooned as it died, but Pidge didn’t stick around to mourn it. They cut a three sides of a square along the top of the duct and pried it down so it bent along the fourth side, forming a barrier in the duct.

It wasn’t much, but it would give them warning if the Galra sent another drone. They should, in theory, give the other vent the same treatment, but that would take time—time they didn’t have. They settled in near the corner of the room, where they had no fewer than three computer banks between them and the unblocked air duct, and refocused on the holoscreen.

The distraction had cost them precious seconds—long enough for the command ship’s AI to try to force-feed the computer in Pidge’s armor some kind of alien malware. Pidge aborted the download, kicked the temp file to a quarantine folder, and got back to work.

Two AI-operated anti-hacker obstacle courses later, they wiped the last, desperation-flavored error message aside. “I’m in!” they cried. “Give me just one second to—ha-ha!”

The instant Pidge hit _enter_ , there was a racket in the hallway as several dozen sentries dropped to the floor, the central AI that controlled them all erased from the nerve center. No AI meant no orders. No orders meant no control. No control meant every sentry in the fleet was now so much dead weight.

On the comms, Pidge heard shouts of surprise and delight, while decidedly _less_ happy shouts trickled in from the corridor. Grinning, Pidge deactivated their holoscreen and keyboard, then charged after Allura. She’d reverted to her Altean state, he face shining with sweat, but she was as quick as ever as she chased down a pair of Galra soldiers who had decided to run upon losing all their metallic friends.

It would have been the smart choice, except they hadn’t counted on Allura, who shouldered her way through the door the second guard slammed in her face. Pidge heard twin cries, then the sound of something heavy dropping to the floor.

They stepped through the ruined doorway just as Allura tossed the door aside, staring down at the slightly squished and very much unconscious guards at her feet.

Pidge raised an eyebrow. “Did that feel good?”

“Very,” said Allura. “Now let’s go. Shiro! Ryner! We’re on our way out. Do you copy?”

“Loud and clear, princess,” said Shiro. “We’re on our way to the extraction point. Be there in thirty seconds. And, hey. Nice work, Pidge.”

Pidge cheered as they ran, leaping over more than a few sentries as they went. Today was a _good_ day.

* * *

“Guys?” Lance called, his voice breathless from sprinting down twisting, abandoned corridors into the depths of Haggar’s ship. _Haggar’s_ ship. “Shit. _Guys!_ Shiro? Keith? Anyone? I could use a little help here. Hello?”

No answer. Well, that settled it. Whatever hope Lance had held out for cosmic space dust interfering with the comms, or the heat of battle distracting the rest of his team, or whatever other paper-thin excuse he could come up with--all that flew out the window.

Haggar really had blocked his comms. (As per freaking usual.) The tech junkies had all been way too busy tearing Shiro’s arm apart to work on upgrading the comms—a project that had already taken a little bit of a back seat because of Shiro and Allura’s pseudo-telepathy powers. Which, _by the way_ , were totally useless if, say, Allura left the Black Lion to go help Pidge hack an army.

A puff of black smoke announced Haggar’s arrival just in time for Lance to scream, skid on the side of his boot, and very nearly fall on his nose in his haste to course-correct toward a witch-less side passage.

“Goddamn druid teleportation magic!” he cried. He was screwed. So, so screwed. He should’ve listened to Shiro and waited for backup.

Except, well, _no_ , because ‘backup’ meant ‘Shiro,’ and Shiro plus Haggar equaled _very bad things._ What the _quiznak_ was Haggar doing here anyway? They’d gotten rid of the tracker, hadn’t they? Did she have a backup? Did she figure they’d be here anyway just because it was such a big battle? Had she come for the Kera rebellion, and Lance was just a lucky surprise?

No way. There was such a thing as a coincidence, but this was way too convenient. Haggar was here for Shiro, and if Lance didn’t find a way to get past evil alien Blink back there, he was going to turn into bait.

For now there was nothing to do but keep running and try to get to an outside wall. He was pretty sure he could get Blue to come pick him up again as long as she didn’t have to blast through half a ship to reach him. He _hoped_ he could make that trick work again. It shouldn’t be a problem, right? Their bond was obviously strong enough, and he _really_ needed her now.

The real problem was the way Haggar kept jumping in front of him. It was like she knew where he was going (which was ridiculous, because _Lance_ didn’t know where he was going.)

No. He had to _think._ Haggar had magic, but it had to follow rules. It had to have limits. She wasn’t omniscient, otherwise they all would’ve been dead a long time ago. She knew where he was going, but she only seemed to teleport to his location once he got too close to the hull. So either she wasn’t actually trying to kill him, just keep him contained, or she didn’t _actually_ know where he was—only when he’d crossed some kind of imaginary line.

Either way, if he kept to the center of the ship, he might have a minute to breathe and think things through.

Lance slowed, despite every instinct telling him that to slow was death. He kept his rifle up and ready to fire, but Haggar didn’t show.

_Okay. Okay, what does this tell me?  
_

Nothing he didn’t already know. He wasn’t far enough out to draw Haggar in, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t watching him right now. He needed more information.

A little blue dot blinked on the map projected on the inside of his visor. Well, _map_ might have been a bit generous. His armor had filled in an approximation of the areas he’d passed through, thanks to some old-timey Altean dungeon crawling program, but that still left an awful lot of holes. But it gave him an idea how close he was to the hull, which was why he’d kept it up after Haggar showed her ugly mug.

The BLIP-tech readings were still active, and that one signature that kept popping up in the same place was just ahead.

If Haggar _was_ watching, breaking an Altean prisoner out of her personal jail ought to be enough to draw her out, right? Lance supposed that depended on how much she cared about this prisoner (assuming there _was_ a prisoner) and how much she wanted to keep her spying technique secret.

Whatever. It was a plan, and he wasn’t finding any better alternatives. Maybe this would just end with Lance _and_ the prisoner dead, but at least he would have given it his best shot.

He turned around and jogged back toward the heart of Haggar’s ship, his skin crawling with every door he passed. He expected Haggar to emerge from any one of them, or drop down on him from above, or teleport a knife into his heart ( _God_ , he hoped that wasn’t something she could do.)

The halls remained eerily silent, nothing but the echoes of Lance’s footsteps and his own breath rattling in his ears.

He stopped outside a plain-looking door. There was a hand scanner beside the door, but that was true for more than half the doors he’d already passed. Nothing else set this door apart from the rest, but the blinking blue dot on Lance’s visor waited just a couple feet in front of him.

Lance held his breath and poked cautiously at the hand scanner. It didn’t react, of course. It would be species-coded to Galra vital signatures, just like every other lock on every other Galra ship in the universe.

 _Screw it._ Lance raised his gun, pointed the barrel at the hand scanner, and squeezed the trigger.

The scanner exploded in a cascade of sparks, bits of molten metal raining down around Lance’s feet. He didn’t honestly expect anything to happen, but his gun _did_ fire bolts of pure energy. He figured overloading the circuit might make it freak out.

It did. Kind of. The door jerked open about six inches, then ground to a halt as the fried circuits crapped out. But six inches was enough to give Lance a look inside the room.

It was small, a tiny cot on the far wall, the corner of what might have been a desk beside it. From what little Lance could see, he could have crossed from one side of the room to the other in about three steps. Not necessarily a prison cell—certainly not the cold, metal cages found in most Galra prisons—but definitely not a first class suite. There didn’t appear to be anyone inside.

Lance heard a sniffle, a shuffle of movement from the right side of the room, where the maybe-desk was. He couldn’t see into that corner with the door like this, but he could have sworn--

There it was again! “Hey,” Lance hissed. “Psst. Anyone in there? Hello?”

The prisoner didn’t answer, but there was a sharp intake of breath, clear as day.

“I can hear you, you know. It’s okay. I’m one of the good guys. I’m here to save you, okay?” Lance paused, but whoever was inside still wasn’t answering. Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe they were gagged, or mute, or maybe they didn’t have a translator. If they couldn’t understand what Lance was saying, they might not want to risk an answer.

That was fine. He’d just have to… get in there. Somehow. Glancing over his shoulder to make sure he was still alone (he was; it very well might have been just Lance, Haggar, and the prisoners on this ship), Lance braced his shoulder against the partially-open door and shoved. His feet slid on the floor panels, but slowly—painfully slowly—the door began to inch open.

As soon as it was wide enough to squeeze through, Lance was inside, hands up in what he hoped was a universal gesture for, _I mean you no harm._ He turned toward the source of the sniffles.

And froze.

It was a boy huddled under the tiny desk, dressed in the purple rags of a Galra prisoner. His amber eyes were wide with fear in his gaunt face, his hands locked around his knees. He had dark skin—a deep, cool brown several shades darker than Allura’s—and a knotted mess of black curls that didn’t quite cover a network of wounds, burns maybe, across his head and neck. It was hard to say how old he was, what with alien lifespans and all that, but he _looked_ young. Younger than Lance. Maybe younger than Pidge.

And he was Altean.

“Guess the scans were right,” Lance muttered, blinking a few times in case the pointy ears and golden-yellow _glaes_ markings decided to disappear.

They didn’t.

He wanted to punt Haggar into a supernova.

Lance’s disgust must have showed through his shock, for the boy cringed back, huddling deeper under the table, and Lance’s stomach twisted at the raw terror on his face. Moving slowly so as not to scare the kid any further, Lance dropped to one knee, holding one hand out toward the boy in what he hoped was a non-threatening invitation. He forced his anger down, plastered a smile on his face. The shaking in his hands was beyond his control, though.

Why were so many Galra prisoners _kids_?

“It’s okay,” Lance whispered. “It’s okay, I’m gonna get you out of here.” Yeah, sure. Never mind he didn’t know how to get _himself_ out. (Didn’t matter, though, did it? Lance wasn’t leaving this boy behind for anything.) “My name’s Lance.”

The boy didn’t respond, just stared at Lance, his wide eyes flicking up and down. Maybe he recognized Lance’s paladin armor. Maybe he just knew that Lance wasn’t a Galra and therefore probably wasn’t the enemy.

Either way, he uncurled himself from his hiding spot, reaching one hand out toward Lance’s.

Lance smiled, holding himself still. This kid had clearly seen some shit, and Lance wasn’t about to scare him more. “That’s right,” he said, projecting as much confidence as he could. “We’re gonna get out of here. I’m taking you away from these bastards.”

He could already hear Shiro scolding him for swearing in front of a kid (never mind that Pidge had a dirtier mouth than any of them), but the kid didn’t even flinch. He hesitated for a moment just an inch or two away, then grabbed onto Lance’s hand and let himself be pulled to his feet.

“Great!” Lance said. “You’re doing great. Now just, uh, follow me.” Lance headed for the door, glancing both ways down the hallway before stepping through and pulling the kid behind him. “You got a name?”

The kid just stared at him, squeezing Lance’s hand so tight it was probably going to leave bruises.

“That’s okay,” Lance said. “We can do introductions later. Okay, buddy? That’s what I used to call my brother, you know. Buddy.” He waited for an objection, but none came. “Okay. Come on, buddy. Let’s get out of here.”

* * *

Shiro and Ryner wheeled toward one of the few remaining warships, lasers flashing neon-blue death. Coran’s wormhole trick (which Shiro still found more than a little unnerving, however much Coran assured him the castle’s anti-wormhole defenses were more competent) had taken out a solid third of the fleet, and once Zelka had brought the weapons back online they’d resorted to hammering through the remaining warships’ shields.

The fleet was already floundering by the time Pidge took out the sentries, and now—nearly all the support ships dead in the air, the warships falling one by one to a combination of the castle-ship, the _Hope of Kera_ , and two Voltron Lions—victory was a foregone conclusion.

Shiro sliced through this warship’s engines with his jaw blade while Ryner anchored Green’s claws deep in the hull, her eyes closing in concentration. “You might want to get clear,” she told Shiro. The calmness in her voice might have been creepy if he didn’t know it for concentration. Heck, it was _still_ a little creepy, but Shiro took Ryner’s advice and pulled back.

It was good he had. Just a few seconds after Ryner’s warning, the violet glow of Quintessence began to leak through the armored hull plates of the warship, flickering like lightning inside a cloud bank. The Green Lion withdrew, and the ship silently tore itself apart.

Shiro looked on, dumbstruck, as a few last wisps of Quintessence drifted among the wreckage. “Do I even _want_ to know what that was?”

Ryner smiled, and Shiro remembered that this was a woman who’d led her people in a years-long rebellion, turning her environment into a living fortress against Galra attacks. She, like Pidge, was harder than she appeared and unflinching in her attacks. “The Green Lion and I excited the Quintessence, creating a catastrophic chain-reaction that overloaded their systems.”

“Oooh, wait a minute,” Hunk said, his interest clear despite the fatigue in his voice. “Quintessence has an excited state? Is it like atomic excitation? Does that mean you can ionize Quintessence? Ryner. _Ryner._ You have to tell me everything.”

Shiro rolled his eyes, smiling faintly. “Later, Hunk.” This had been a long, _unusual_ battle. Between Coran’s wormholes and Ryner’s excited Quintessence, things had turned out a lot flashier than Shiro had been expecting. Flashier than the Galra had been expecting, probably.

He checked the scanners, noting just two more warships in the immediate vicinity, not counting the command ship. Leaving those stragglers to Coran and Anamuri, Shiro wheeled Black around toward the command ship. “All right, Ryner. Let’s go pick up Pidge and Allura.”

They took out the smattering of still-functional turrets as they approached, coming in below the main shield. No one had wanted to risk firing on the command ship with allies aboard, but Shiro doubted it would last long now. He let Black guide him toward Allura, trusting their bond rather than trying to tune the BLIP-tech scanners to Allura’s signature. Like a string attached to his navel, it pulled them together, and Shiro blasted a hole in a hangar door in the aft of the ship.

A handful of ships and a mountain of dead sentries tumbled out, rattling against Black’s shields as she pushed through them, Green just behind her. They landed side-by-side in the hangar, and the inner airlock opened, spilling Pidge and Allura into the vacuum. They fired their jetpacks, shooting into their waiting lions, and Shiro didn’t wait for Allura to reach the cockpit before he turned and headed for open space.

“We got them,” Shiro called as Pidge and Ryner followed him out. “Take them out, Coran.”

Lasers more powerful than any lion’s streaked past him, bursting against the particle barrier like molten light. But Shiro hardly noticed that; Allura had just placed her hands on her pedestals at the center of the Black Lion’s cockpit, and Shiro’s mind was racing out toward the others.

He found Keith and Matt first, twining through a decimated fleet over Berylis. Only the warship seemed to be in fighting condition, but there was no doubt in the red paladins’ minds that it would be over soon. They spun, flaring their engines to slow their momentum, and activated the ion cannon on Red’s back.

Hunk and Shay weren’t far away, and Allura had already looked them over for injuries or duress. The Yellow Lion had taken a beating, and Hunk was still slithering through her inner workings, fixing the last few systems that had gone offline during the fight. Shay sat in the pilot’s seat, shaken but slowly uncoiling as Hunk kept up a stream of mindless chatter.

Shiro smiled. Four lions accounted four. Four pairs of pilots in good health. That only left--

_Lance._

Shiro’s mind whipped across the system toward Trenvila. He felt the Blue Lion out there, surrounded by a blur of motion.

Lance wasn’t in the cockpit.

Shock and fear echoed in the space between Shiro and Allura, and Shiro searched back, trying to remember the last time he’d heard from Lance. He’d been talking about the prisoners on that other warship. He was going to wait for Shiro to come help with the rescue. How long ago had that been? Ten minutes? Twenty? Lance had been silent ever since.

Allura stretched her attention further, but she seemed to run up against a wall. Shiro caught a few, fleeting images: Lance sighting down his rifle; Lance twisting to look over his shoulder, backlit by the familiar purple glow of Galra crystals; Lance and another figure, small and cowering, stealing down an empty hallway.

A vague impression of fear hung over the images, but Shiro wasn’t sure if it was Lance’s or his own.

“That ship’s fighers are still functional,” Allura whispered, but her quiet words were enough to silence the other paladins.

“What do you mean?” Hunk asked, a tremor in his voice. “What ship?”

Shiro swallowed, turning his worries to cold determination. Lance was in danger; Shiro couldn’t waste time on fear now. “The one Lance was fighting. The one by Trenvila. It must be another command ship.”

“Wait,” Pidge said. “ _Was_? Did something happen to Lance?”

“I don’t know.” Shiro was already flying for the Blue Lion as fast as Black could carry him. “But I don’t like this.”

* * *

Lance and the Altean boy were on their way within a few minutes, slowed only briefly by a last-minute detour back to the room where the boy had been held so Lance could grab the pillow and blanket off the cot. The blanket he wrapped around the boy’s shoulders—he was shivering in a way Lance didn’t think could be fully explained by fear, and it seemed to help him to have something he could cling to besides Lance’s arm.

Not that Lance minded the kid clinging to him, exactly, but he needed both hands free to use his rifle, and he didn’t want to give Haggar even a split second more advantage over him than she’d have anyway.

His bayard was deactivated for now, though, and he held the pillow in front of him like a shield. The Altean boy seemed to find that amusing, which was a nice bonus as far as Lance was concerned.

They were getting close now.

Lance had been keeping an eye on the doors they passed, watching for one without a hand scanner. (One mangled lock was enough for one infiltration, he figured.) He spotted one ahead, and when he opened it he found a small closet within, dusty shelves covered with buckets and spray bottles and funny-looking tools.

“Perfect,” he said, then turned and knelt down in front of the boy. He wasn’t really _that_ much shorter than Lance—probably an inch taller than Pidge—and kneeling put Lance’s face a few inches lower than the boy’s, but Lance had a sneaking suspicion this kid had been subject to a lot of angry, looming Galra recently. “How you doing, buddy?” Lance asked gently.

The boy clutched more tightly at his blanket and averted his gaze.

Lance sighed. “I know. We’re gonna get out of here really soon, I promise. But listen. You know the gross old hag who runs this place?” The boy’s cringe said, yes, he knew _exactly_ who Haggar was. Lance grimaced. “I’ve got to go make sure she’s not going to stop us on the way out, so I need you to hide for a few minutes, okay? Just a few minutes, and then I’ll be back, and I’m gonna get you out of here. Okay, buddy?”

For a second, he thought the boy was going to panic. His eyes had gone wide, and his breathing was quick and shallow. But he nodded, and Lance squeezed his wrist once to reassure him before stepping aside. The boy pressed himself into the back corner of the closet and crouched down, watching Lance with fearful eyes.

Lance’s mouth ran dry. “I’ll be back soon,” he promised, then shut the door.

Well, now there was nothing for it but to go through with this crazy-ass plan. The ship had become an eshet map in his head, and for all he kept telling himself that real life was not a game, he was very quickly running out of options. Eshet was a game—but it was a strategy game, meant to prepare people for this sort of thing. All Lance had to do was figure out Haggar’s plan, then work around it.

He visualized the board as he headed toward the outer hallways. It was a one-on-one game so far, and though Lance wouldn’t bet his life on Haggar keeping the odds fair, he could—for now—take comfort in the fact he only had to anticipate one person's moves. Besides, this match was set up like a game of Rebellion--Haggar had every advantage, but Lance didn't need to take her down to win.

_Goal: get the kid off this ship.  
_

_Goal: find the other prisoners and get them off, too._

_Bonus: get yourself out alive._

Lance slowed as he neared the place he’d last seen Haggar. He had a plan—a feint that might draw Haggar out without getting Lance killed—but he didn’t know how far he could go before he’d spring Haggar’s trap. If he was smart, he would have been paying attention to where she’d teleported in, but he’d been running on panic at the time, and he hadn’t stuck around to test his theory once he’d come up with it.

At least by now he was mostly sure it was a location that attracted Haggar, not a device or magic spell that tracked Lance himself. There was _no_ way she would have let him grab the Altean boy if she’d known where he was.

So he was just going to have to try his feint again and again until something happened.

Activating his bayard, he held it loosely in one hand, the other tapping his stolen pillow against his thigh. There were about a thousand ways this plan could fail—Haggar might be watching for vital signs, not movement, to name just one—but he didn’t exactly have a guinea pig to toss into Haggar’s paladin catcher.

Shaking his head, Lance readied himself: stance wide, pillow ready to fly. He breathed out, then chucked the pillow and instantly brought his rifle up, ready to shoot at the first sign of black smoke.

The hallway remained empty.

He crept forward, turning slow circles in case Haggar appeared behind him, but he reached the place where his pillow had landed without incident. Spinning once more in search of lurkers, Lance crouched, snatched up the pillow, then turned, tossed, and brought his rifle up again.

Three more repetitions of this pattern brought nothing but livewire nerves and a severe case of self-doubt. This was a stupid plan. Why had he _ever_ thought this plan would work?

He hurled the pillow as hard as he could—and this time a haze of black mist appeared in its wake. Lance blinked, then remembered himself. He swung his rifle up, waited for the mist to solidify, then--

The laser pulse was brighter than usual, or so it seemed. Lance had been wandering around in this perpetual purple twilight for so long his eyes had begun to adjust. The sudden brightness stung his eyes, but he didn’t let himself blink. He squinted, firing again, and a third time, all before Haggar had time to react to his attack.

She spun, roared, and vanished in a flash of smoke, reappearing less than a foot from Lance, her claws outstretched toward him, ready to tear him apart.

Lance yelped, scrambling backwards before he could be eviscerated. _Great plan, Mendoza!_ he told himself. _Piss off the murder witch! You’re a genius!_

He didn’t have much time to berate himself. Haggar was still chasing after him, lightning flashing from her fingertips. One of these spells grazed him, wrapping him up in a sensation that felt a little bit like biting down on tin foil: shivery and wrong, but not exactly painful.

That was probably the adrenaline.

He kept running, ready for the black smoke that preceded each of Haggar’s teleportations. It was a narrow warning, but it was long enough for him to aim (more or less) and shoot, and more often than not it forced her to teleport away again.

Then she decided to switch it up, and instead of _a_ cloud of smoke, her next teleportation brought a dozen copies of her fading into being in the hallway ahead of him. Lance skidded to a stop, shooting three Haggars before he realized that this was an illusion. (He hoped it was an illusion. One Haggar was enough of a death sentence.)

The three Haggars he’d shot shivered at the lasers’ touch but reformed, unscathed by their brush with high-energy death.

The other nine clones charged toward him, and Lance knew there was no way he could shoot them all in the second and a half it would take for them to overtake him. He could pray for luck and hope he shot the real Haggar early, or…

Lance spun and took off for the last hallway he’d passed, charging straight through a Haggar-illusion with a ball of raw electricity in her hand. His skin crawled with the knowledge that that Haggar could just as easily have been the real one, and then he’d be dead now.

_Come on, think positive. You just gotta… figure out a plan…_

Eshet did not, as far as Lance was aware, have an illusion mechanic. Didn’t seem to be a very common ability, even among aliens.

Video games, on the other hand, _really liked_ pitting you against clones. Sometimes the clones stuck around, sometimes they vanished as soon as you touched them, but either way Lance’s strategy was usually the same: AOE. Granted, Lance’s IRL paladin class didn’t give him access to area-of-attack spells, but it _did_ give him a magical weapon that could become whatever he needed it to be.

 _God,_ he hoped this worked.

Lance deactivated his bayard, concentrated on weapons that could give him what he needed. Like a shotgun, maybe, or a flamethrower—well, maybe not that. Flames were Red’s area. (Oh, god. Matt with a flamethrower. No, _Keith_ with a flamethrower. Best not to give either of them that idea.)

Lance activated his bayard, and for a second he thought it hadn’t worked. It was still a gun—a little shorter than his rifle, a little thicker, but still basically gun-shaped. But it _was_ different, and Lance figured his bayard wouldn’t suddenly decide to become something _less_ useful than what he was already using, right?

Right. Lance pivoted on his toes, bringing his bayard up and around and squeezing the trigger with the barrel pointed at the center of the pack of Haggars.

A slug of energy the size of a tennis ball shot out of the gun and made a slow, drooping arc toward the ground. It landed with a squelch about two steps behind the Haggar in the lead, quivered, and remained stuck in place. Lance had less than a heartbeat to be disappointed in his dud of a weapon before the slug pulsed radiant blue and shattered into a wave of plasma.

Lance yelped, summoning his shield in the instant before the gooey blue shrapnel hit him. When his ears stopped ringing, he looked up and found the hallway scorched in a hundred places, a two-foot hole in the floor. There was only one Haggar left, and she was howling in rage as she clutched at a sizeable burn on her side.

“Yeah!” Lance cried, pumping his fists in the air. “Sticky bomb!”

Haggar’s head snapped up, and Lance was pretty sure he’d never seen anyone look so perfectly murderous before.

He swallowed his elation and took off running before Haggar could electrocute him.

She must have been in a lot of pain, because she didn’t teleport in front of him before he rounded the first corner. Or the second. Thirty seconds later, Lance finally slowed, panting, and watched for signs of an attack.

Nothing.

Okay, so his plan had worked, more or less. He’d successfully provoked Haggar with the pillow, proving that she had some kind of alarm system rigged up to warn her if he got within… He checked his armor’s map of the ship. About half Blue’s body length from the outer hull. Lance couldn’t count on Blue being able to come any deeper than that, so he was going to have to find another way out.

He wondered if the perimeter was in effect on the other levels, too.

The first thing to do was pick up the Altean boy. It had been five minutes by now, and Lance didn’t want the kid to panic. Besides, he could always find a hiding place a few floors down before he made a run for the hull again.

 _Not down,_ Lance decided. _Up._ Down was closer to escape, yes, but that meant Haggar was more likely to have booby traps set up. If Lance headed up, though, he’d eventually run into the other Galra stationed on this ship. (He had to assume there were other Galra on this ship—he’d _seen_ the number of NPCs he needed to pilot a battle-class ship in the deep space eshet simulations. Haggar needed help to have made it out here. Lots of help.)

Lots of help meant lots of activity, which _meant_ Haggar’s motion detector couldn’t be installed on the floors that were currently in use. If Lance could get up there, maybe then he could cut across to the hull and make his escape.

It was a plan.

Lance headed back to the closet where he’d left the kid, and when he opened the door he was greeted with about two seconds of stillness. Just long enough for the kid to recognize Lance, after which he barreled forward, crashing into Lance with a hug that nearly knocked Lance off his feet.

“Woah!” Lance dismissed his bayard to grab onto the boy with both hands. “It’s okay, buddy. I’m right here. I’m right here.” He waited for the boy to look up, then smiled. “You ready to get out of here?”

The boy nodded, pulling back. Lance held out his hand for the kid to hold onto, then glanced at the ceiling. His bayard’s new sticky bomb-grenade launcher form could probably blast through the metal plating, but the blast would attract Haggar’s attention for sure.

Then again, what were the odds she’d left any non-booby-trapped elevators running on this floor?

“This is gonna get loud, buddy,” Lance said, letting go of the kid’s hand momentarily to summon his bayard and aim it at the ceiling. “And we’re gonna have to move fast. You ready?”

Hands clutched at Lance’s armor, and a head nodded against his back.

“Okay, here we go.”

Lance stood in the middle of an intersection, fired a goo grenade at the ceiling a good twenty feet down the left branch, traded his bayard for his shield, and pulled the kid around the corner, shielding them both as best he could when the blast hit.

The boy tensed, but when Lance pulled him to his feet he moved quickly, following Lance around the corner to their new trap door. Lance grabbed the kid and fired his jets, shooting them up through the hole to the next floor. Lance didn’t slow, though, just sprinted off, still carrying the Altean boy, trying to put as much distance as possible between him and the incriminating hole in the floor.

He only stopped when he came to a long, unbroken wall. Deja vu hit him hard, and he called up his map. Sure enough, he was back near the central mass of vital signatures. Curious, he jogged a quick circuit of the room that, one floor below, had had no entrance. There was no door here, either, and something about that sat very wrong with Lance.

Lucky for him he had a portable door-maker now.

Lance left the boy around the corner, edged a short distance down the corridor, and fired at the wall. He turned and sprinted for cover, skidding in next to the boy just as the explosion went off.

He turned to the kid, grinning. “Fancy helping me free a few more prisoners?” he asked.

The boy hesitated, but then he latched onto Lance’s elbow and nodded, his face set in grim determination. The fear that had covered him like a second skin when Lance had first found him was still there, but it was fading. Whatever Haggar had done to this kid, she hadn’t broken him. Not completely. Lance hoped that meant he would heal—and not just the burns on his head and his painfully bony frame.

Hugging the boy against his side, Lance headed back toward the hole in the wall and peered through. He’d been expecting some kind of prison block; honestly he’d half expected to find some mutilated guards on the other side of the explosion.

Instead, he found himself looking down on a hangar: wide open space twenty floors tall or more, with a pair of bay doors visible far below. There were no guards within—maybe this place had already been deserted, maybe they’d run for cover when Lance blew a hole in the wall. It didn’t matter either way.

What worried him more was the massive… creature… standing upright but perfectly still in the center of the room.

It was a robeast, tall and vaguely humanoid, with wicked-looking claws and cannons in its palms and veins of Quintessence glowing beneath its armored skin. There were bright yellow marks on the steel mask it had in place of a face, just below the eyes. Marks that looked all too much like _glaes._

The boy’s hands tightened their hold on Lance, almost painfully so, but he was too busy trying not to be sick to complain.

That was a robeast. And the kid Lance had rescued was its pilot.

“Fuck that,” Lance muttered. Holding tight to the kid, he jumped through the hole he’d made, using his jets to control his descent. There was an enclosed control booth along one wall, and he headed for it, hoping it contained the robeast controls. It did, but it took Lance all of five seconds to remember he didn’t know how Galra computers worked.

At least whoever had been here last had left the computer on. Must’ve been real freaked out by the explosion. But Lance would take it, as long as it meant he could work the controls without needing proper clearance.

Growling, he stared out through the reinforced glass at the robeast, which the kid refused to look at. In case there was any doubt what Haggar was doing here. Lance wanted nothing more than to tear that thing apart, but he couldn’t. The robeasts and their pilots were connected somehow; killing the pilot killed the robeast—Shiro and Allura had proved that back on Maorel. Lance couldn’t take the chance that the same held true in reverse.

But he also wasn’t going to leave Haggar to do with it as she pleased. She could destroy it herself once Lance escaped with the boy, and then he was dead anyway.

Lance’s eyes fell on a button on the screen. Pidge’s translator still had a bit of trouble with text, but this was short and easy enough to read.

OPEN HANGAR DOORS

Lance grinned.

He hesitated just before pressing the button, though. This was more than a way to ditch the robeast. It was a way _out_.

Except the kid was still dressed in paper thin prison garb. He’d be fine as long as they stayed in the booth and kept the doors closed, but he’d die in a heartbeat out there in the vacuum of space. Lance glanced around, hoping for a fortuitous space suit to materialize, but he’d run fresh out of luck.

 _Getting him out’s the first priority,_ Lance reminded himself, then started to remove his armor.

The kid gave a start, and Lance waved his hands. “It’s okay. It’s fine. I just need you to put this on—don’t worry, it’s Altean tech. Self-sizing. My friend, Pidge? They’re about your size, and this armor fits them just fine. Well, the green armor, but it’s the same thing. Anyway… what?”

The boy shook his head, but his eyes were wide as he stared at the armor pieces littering the floor. Lance pulled off the last piece—his breastplate—then got to work helping the kid get dressed. True to form, the armor adjusted itself automatically, forming around the kid’s body like it had been made for him.

Soon the only piece left was the helmet. Lance’s eyes darted to the burns visible through the kid’s hair and grimaced.

“Who _are_ you?”

The boy’s voice was soft, and a little deeper than Lance had been expecting. Then again, he wasn’t sure _what_ he’d been expecting. He’d kinda started to think the boy simply couldn’t talk.

But he was staring at Lance now, and Lance had a job to do, damn it.

“My name’s Lance,” he said, reaching out to shake the kid’s hand. “I’m a paladin of Voltron.”

He didn’t think it was possible for the kid’s eyes to get any wider, but they did. His jaw dropped, too. It was almost comical, except that it didn’t erase the signs of his captivity. Lance wondered if he’d grown up hearing stories about Voltron. He wondered if the Altean survivors still remembered Allura and Coran.

Footsteps sounded beyond the door that led out of the hangar, a timely reminder that this was still a jailbreak. Lance fitted his helmet over the kid’s head, watched as it resized itself, then tapped the side to seal the facemask.

“Looks like _you’re_ the blue paladin now, buddy,” he said, grinning despite the fear closing in around his heart. With a frantic look at the door, he summoned his bayard so he'd still have it after the kid got shot out into space, then shoved him out of the booth. “Don’t worry. Blue’ll pick you up.” He could feel her, flying restless circles around the ship, her cloak winding down to its last few minutes. She perked up as his mind turned toward her, then balked as she saw his plan.

_Heh. Sorry, Blue. It’s just strategy. He’s the important part of this mission. I’m just… I’m just the escort._

He’d never liked sacrificing his units, whatever the rules of eshet said about acceptable loss. Should’ve known he’d be learning that lesson the hard way. Too bad he wouldn’t get a chance to put it to use against Coran.

Lance backed into the booth and sealed the door. The door on the far side of the hangar burst open to reveal a squad of Galra soldiers, who poured into the large space, weapons aimed at the boy. Lance slammed his fist down before anyone had a chance to hurt him.

Lance didn’t even know his name.

The hangar door groaned as it opened, and the air in the hangar rushed toward the vacuum, sweeping along anything and everything not bolted down. Lance caught one last glimpse of frightened amber eyes before the boy tumbled out of sight.

A second later, Blue purred inside his head, assuring him she’d picked up her new passenger.

He was safe.

He was _safe._

Lance watched, numb, as the guards (now dead) and the robeast (still alive, if those things could be called _alive_ ) followed the boy out of the ship.

Haggar’s scream drove spikes into Lance’s ears, but he welcomed the pain as a warning to dive out of the way before—yep. Lightning flashed into the control booth, frying the controls as it arced from surface to surface. Well, good. Saved Lance the trouble of destroying it all.

The space was too small to avoid the attack entirely, and Lance cried out as the purple lightning raged through his body. He wasn’t sure if it was because Haggar was royally pissed off now, or if his armor had done a better job protecting him than he thought, but this was way worse than the chewing-on-tinfoil sensation he’d felt last time her magic brushed up against him. This was closer to a fire in his bones, a full-body charlie horse that made his hands claw at empty air and his legs forget how to run.

It lasted only a second, and when Lance hit the floor he felt drained, like he’d just run a marathon on no sleep.

_Oh. Right. That stuff drains Quintessence._

One more hit of that and he was dead, but he simply didn’t have the energy to run. His armor was gone, his energy nearly so. All he had on him was his bayard…

Haggar was in the control booth now, glaring down at him with bared teeth, the red tattoos on her face like little rivers of blood. Lance forced a laugh, though his chest didn’t want to move that much. “I think that’s checkmate,” he whispered. “Or, no, what’s that thing Coran’s always saying? The castle takes the day…? Eh, something.”

Haggar stared down at him, one eye twitching. Mad he wasn’t dead yet? Or maybe she just didn’t appreciate his sense of humor. He wondered whether she could teleport away fast enough to save herself if he blew out all the windows and let the vacuum of space claim them.

He didn’t have a chance to find out. The sound of a stampede sounded in the corridor, and--shooting a panicked glance at the door--Haggar teleported away.

“ _Lance!_ ”

Lance knew that voice. He knew…

“Shiro?”

* * *

Shiro’s heart had stopped beating at the sight of Lance, crumpled on the floor of the ruined control booth, his armor gone, his undersuit singed, his face pale and bloodied. It didn’t start beating again until he heard Lance’s voice. Weak though it was, it was a promise. Lance was alive. Shiro wasn’t too late.

“You’re okay, Lance,” Shiro said, glancing at Allura as she knelt beside him. She took one look at Lance, then turned and shouted for Shay. “We’re here. You’re going to be just fine.”

“No.”

Shiro froze, snatching his hands away from Lance, afraid he’d hurt him.

But Lance’s eyes were open, the pupils wide black pits of fear. “No,” he said again, a little more force behind his words. He shifted, trying to push himself upright, and cried out. In the hallway outside, the others shifted. Shiro suspected they all would have been at Lance’s side if they weren’t expecting an ambush. They’d found no signs of a fight on their way to Lance's vital signature. Nothing at all until this control room.

What the _hell_ had happened?

Shay knelt beside Lance, her hands already glowing as she worked to stabilize him. A frown flickered across her face. “His Quintessence,” she began, but Lance pushed her away.

“Shiro...”

Shiro leaned forward into Lance’s line of view, hoping the sight of him would calm Lance. Instead, it seemed to have the opposite effect.

“You need to go,” he wheezed.

Shiro frowned. “What?”

“Go,” Lance repeated, planting a hand on Shiro’s chest. He seemed to be regaining his strength, if slowly. “ _Haggar’s here._ ”

Shiro had the space of two heartbeats to feel the fear trickle into his veins, a slow, patient drip of ice. _Haggar_.

Oh, god.

He felt her coming, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, something deep inside his cybernetic arm flaring to life. The hunger he’d felt so many times before. The wildfire heat. The sense that something else resided in the arm and only deigned to let Shiro use it.

His arm activated of its own accord, its feral cry tearing through his mind. He shuddered, and Allura reached out to him, her voice dancing on the edge of his awareness. He wanted to tell her to go, to run. _I don’t want to hurt you._

He looked up at her and saw a Nyxt, nameless, helpless, covered in blood. The first victim of Haggar’s Weapon.

After that, there was nothing.

* * *

Allura didn’t have time to react. At the sound of Haggar’s name, Shiro shuddered, his arm powering up in anticipation of a fight. He doubled over, and Allura reached out toward him, concern closing tight around her heart.

“Shiro? Are you--?”

He rounded on her, a luminous yellow film washing over his eyes.

The next thing Allura knew Shiro’s hand was around her neck, white-hot metal searing her skin. Her cry of pain was cut short as he lifted her off her feet and slammed her back against the wall, his lips twisting into a smile that looked utterly foreign on his face.

There was a commotion behind him, weapons drawn, cries of fear, of confusion.

Allura barely noticed it. Her focus had narrowed to the burning vice at her throat, pressing, pressing. She couldn’t breathe.

She clawed at Shiro’s hand, heedless of the heat, her gloves burning away and leaving blisters beneath.

Shiro pressed her harder against the wall.

A flash of light.

Shiro stumbled.

His grip on Allura loosened, and she dropped to the ground. Lance stood behind Shiro, wavering, Shay crouching beside him, arms up to catch him if he fell. Lance held his rifle in shaking hands, tears streaming down his face as he fired again, and again caught Shiro in the back. His armor cracked—a hairline thing, hardly worth worrying over, but Lance flinched visibly at the sound of it.

“Lance, what the hell are you doing?” Matt roared, grabbing Lance by the shoulder and yanking hard. Lance stumbled, falling against the wall. “Why are you attacking Shiro?”

Allura stood, flinching as Shiro turned his gaze on her. “That’s not Shiro.”

“ _What?_ ” Matt hissed. “What do you mean it’s not--?”

Shiro laughed, and if there had been any doubt left in Allura’s mind, that sound erased it. It was a cold, cruel laugh, too high and thin to belong to Shiro. He looked at her with hollow yellow eyes—not merely lambent, the way Keith’s eyes were, or Shay’s. These eyes burned, _blazed_ with light, like windows onto a furnace, and there was no life within.

Lance raised his gun again, and with a cry, Matt threw himself at Lance, who shoved him backward into Keith, knocking them both to the ground. Lance turned back to Shiro. Sighted.

Allura couldn’t breathe. She wanted to stop Lance, but she was frozen. Afraid.

She didn’t know what to do.

_I would want you to kill me._

Lance’s expression wavered, tears welling up behind his eyes. He swore, clenching his jaw, and put his finger to the trigger.

Dark smoke filled the room, and for an instant all Allura could see was Shiro—an empty imitation of Shiro—with Haggar standing at his shoulder.

The smoke swirled, condensing toward a spot in empty air like light falling into a black hole.

When it cleared, both Haggar and Shiro were gone.


	18. The Aftermath

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Lance went head-to-head with Haggar in the depths of her command ship. He found a young Altean prisoner and robeast pilot and sent him to safety in the Blue Lion, but then Haggar cornered Lance. The other paladins showed up before she could kill him, but she took control of Shiro and used him to choke Allura. Lance opened fire at Shiro, distracting him enough for Allura to get away, but before any of them could figure out how to help Shiro, Haggar grabbed him and teleported away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I completely forgot to share this with you all last week, but Pechat continues to spoil me with art of my OCs! This time it's [Meri](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/159549001629/seamarmot-meri-from-squirenonnys-great-duality), Allura's friend and the short-lived pilot of the Blue Lion after Lealle's death. <3

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #382  
>  Dated eight months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Prisoner 155-9870* has been with us for thirty solar cycles and is now fully dependent on synthetic Q. As a feral-type lifeform that has undergone extended Quintessential deprivation, she is able to withstand larger doses of sQ with less severe physical side effects.
> 
> Initial tests suggest 155-9870 is able to sustain a higher than average level of technopathy, including remote access, spatial manipulation, and indirect sensation. In the coming lunar cycles, we hope to explore the extent of technopathic control possible by this subject. It has been suggested that she may be able to control a sentry remotely, though her feral state presents some challenges to these efforts.
> 
> Simultaneous blood tests and physical examinations may reveal the mechanism by which 155-9870 is able to resist the necrosis commonly associated with these levels of synthetic Q doping. With luck, this subject will provide the key to more powerful experiments with better survival rates.

*Pidge’s notes: This is Matt’s friend Aurel, who was with him on Vel-17 until about one month prior to this entry and who eventually became the Robeast we fought on Shay’s Balmera

* * *

There was no time to mourn.

Even as Haggar disappeared, taking Shiro with her, even as Matt let out a scream that pierced Keith like shards of broken glass, even as everyone else stared on with mounting horror, an alarm began to sound.

Keith flinched away from the wail and the flashing lights, every muscle in his body on fire. He wanted to run, wanted to fight, _needed_ to find Shiro and bring him back. (Haggar had him. They’d worked so hard, fought for so long, to get away from her, and now Shiro was back there, alone, and Keith hadn’t _done anything to stop it_.)

“Coran!” Matt cried. His hands were shaking, his eyes feral as he spun an aimless circle, searching the room as though he might find Shiro hiding beneath one of the ruined computer consoles. “Coran, scan the ship!”

Coran’s voice came over the comms, but the words hit Keith from a distance. His world was small and dark: the fear in Matt’s voice. The handprint burned into Allura’s throat. The empty space where Shiro had been. Keith had once promised Shiro he wouldn’t let Haggar take him.

“Vrekt,” he snarled.

“I don’t care about the Galra, Coran!” Matt’s voice was an explosion, too hot and too bright to ignore, raging out of control as he pressed his hands to the side of his helmet. “ _She took Shiro._ We need to get him back.”

This time, Keith did hear Coran’s response, and it made his blood run cold. “You’ll never get to him in time. There are too many soldiers in the way—they’re converging on your location. If you don’t get out of there now, you’ll be swarmed.”

“I’m not leaving,” Matt said.

Lance wavered where he stood, and Keith reached out to steady him, too numb to think about what he was doing, too numb to think about what Haggar had done to Lance. Shiro’s absence throbbed like an open wound.

Matt turned, desperate, searching the other paladins’ faces, searching for… For what? His eyes found Keith, and Keith saw a gaping chasm behind Matt’s gaze. Fear and desperation and guilt. They weren’t inside Red; there was no mental link between them now. But Keith felt his own tempest mirrored back at him. For a moment he thought he might drown in the loss.

Then the numbness broke, and everything plunged beneath the cool, still surface of his resolve. He drew his sword and nodded to Matt.

“Let’s go get him.”

Relief washed over Matt’s face, and they turned together toward the door. Allura was faster, bodily blocking their escape, her face unruffled but her eyes wet and pained. “We _can’t_ ,” she said.

Matt bristled. “I’m not letting her take him, Allura. I’m _not_.”

“So you’ll take on an entire army?” she demanded. “By yourselves?”

Keith let a growl escape him. “I’ve done it before.”

“This is suicide,” Ryner said. Her voice was too calm, too rational. Keith wanted to tear into her, but when he turned, he found her holding Pidge around the shoulders. They were trembling, staring blankly at the spot where Shiro had been, bayard crackling in their hand like they were ready to rip the ship apart. They hardly seemed to notice Ryner’s presence, or her attempt at comfort.

Keith blinked. He looked around at the others—really _looked_ for the first time since Haggar had appeared. Lance was pale, swearing under his breath in a tangled mess of Spanish, English, Altean, and even Galran. The heel of one hand pressed against his eyes like he could force his freely-falling tears back into his eyes. He swayed where he stood, but he hadn’t yet dismissed his bayard.

Shay was still crouched in the center of the room, unmoved from when she’d gone to heal Lance, her eyes wide and unseeing.

Hunk stood in the doorway just behind Allura, a few tear tracks smudging the oil on his face. He glanced down the hallway every few seconds, mouth moving like he wanted to tell them to leave, hands twitching like he wanted to take his bayard and cut down every soldier on this ship.

And Allura.

Allura’s neck was a mess, reddened, shiny-looking skin visible through the remains of her black suit. Similar burns marred the palms of her hands. Her eyes were red and puffy, but she held herself tall, unwavering though it was obvious to Keith, now that he cared to notice, that she was falling apart inside.

“We’ll come back for him,” Allura whispered. “I swear we will, but we _cannot_ stay here now.”

The alarms were still blaring overhead, the sound of distant footsteps echoing through the halls. They would be surrounded soon, and if Haggar hadn’t already begun preparations for a wormhole jump, she would soon, now that she had her prize.

There was nothing they could do.

Matt seemed to realize this at the same time as Keith, and it hit him just as hard. His bayard vanished from his hand, and he seemed to shrink, all the fight draining out of him. He looked up at Allura, closed his eyes, and nodded.

They ran.

* * *

Coran met the paladins in the Black Lion’s hangar. Blue had already landed, returning to the castle-ship almost before the other paladins had made it out to Haggar’s command ship to rescue Lance. Coran wasn’t sure why she’d returned without her paladin, but she seemed restless, her tail lashing as she waited for the other lions to arrive. Her shield had gone up as soon as she landed, and it had yet to come down.

The other four lions landed nearby, but it was a long moment before anyone emerged. Coran’s throat tightened in sympathy, his heart aching for Shiro. Something on Haggar’s ships had interfered with the comms, so Coran had only heard the aftermath of the fight, but it was plain enough what had happened. Haggar had taken control of Shiro, and then she’d simply _taken_ him.

The Black Lion was the first to lower her ramp, but it was Lance who appeared there, battered and wavering on his feet, his black bodysuit singed and torn. Coran’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of him, but Lance ignored Coran altogether and rushed over to Blue, who purred, dismissed her shield, and lowered her head to let Lance in.

Only then did Allura appear, the other six paladins straggling out of their lions after her. Shay had a few spots of red blood on her armor— _red_ , so either human or Altean. Lance’s probably, as none of the other paladins had any visible wounds except Allura, whose neck and hands were badly burned but not bleeding.

Which wasn’t to say any of them had come out of this unscathed. Keith and Ryner’s eyes were dry, but Ryner looked near to fainting and Keith was trembling fit to snap. Coran didn’t doubt that he’d be up on the training deck for the rest of the day, venting his anger and grief the only way he knew how. Very likely everyone would throw themselves into their various tasks until they got Shiro back. If they got Shiro back.

Coran would need to figure out a way to coax them all to sleep.

Silence filled the hangar, broken only by ragged breathing and a few muttered curses in a variety of languages.

“Allura,” Coran whispered, stepping toward her. His eyes stuck on the burns on her throat—burns that told a very clear, very disturbing picture—and he had to force himself to look her in the eye. “What happened?”

“That’s a very good question, Coran.” Allura took a deep breath, sweeping the shards of her emotion under a rug of composure and turning toward the Blue Lion. “Lance! We need to talk.”

There was a long moment of silence before Lance answered from inside Blue, and even then it was hesitant. “Can this wait a second?”

Bristling, Allura drew herself up to her full height. Coran could see her riling herself up, a helpless rage blotting out her sympathy and lenience. She was not a needlessly harsh person, but Coran knew that she grew harder when she felt that things were out of her control. She coped by taking control, and when something resisted that control she pushed back.

Coran reached out to her, knowing this was not a time for a clash of wills, but she shook him off, stalking toward the Blue Lion’s open mouth. “No, it cannot wait! Why were you on that ship? Shiro specifically told you to wait for backup. What was so important--?”

Lance appeared at the top of the ramp, arms spread wide to block Allura’s path. She stopped, jaw slack, and stared at him. He flinched, but stood his ground.

“There were prisoners in there, Allura,” he said, his voice strained. It was obvious he was struggling not to raise his voice—and struggling to stay on his feet. “Well, _a_ prisoner, but--”

“ _A_ prisoner.” Allura crossed her arms. “ _One_ prisoner. Is that what Shiro sacrificed himself for?”

Lance recoiled, blood rushing to his face. But it wasn’t shame that made him flush. It was anger. “We would have lost Shiro whether or not I waited for him. The _second_ he set foot on that ship, Haggar would have taken him. At least this way I got someone out—and, oh, by the way? We’re _paladins_. We help people. One person or a billion, it doesn’t matter.”

“Lance is right,” Hunk said, before Allura could respond. She rounded on him, and his voice deserted him for a moment, but he recovered quickly, squaring his shoulders. “What really would have changed if we’d all gone in together?”

“We could have been prepared,” Allura said. “We were rushed, but we didn’t have to be. We could have planned better. We could have been more cautious.”

Keith was already shaking his head. “The only reason we had _any_ warning was because Lance had already seen that Haggar was there. Without that, we would have been caught entirely off-guard. Haggar probably could have taken control of Shiro from anywhere on that ship. She wouldn’t have needed to show her face.”

“Even so,” said Ryner. “By going in alone, Lance put himself at risk.” She glanced at him, her stern expression softening. “You don’t have to do everything alone, you know.”

Coran saw the hairline fracture in Lance’s composure, but his voice was tamped down and tightly controlled when he spoke. “Easy for you to say.” The others all frowned at that, clearly not understanding what Lance was saying. (Lance, who alone of all the paladins didn’t have a partner there ready to back him up; Lance, who _was_ , in at least one sense, doing the work of two paladins on his own every time he went into battle.)

But Lance didn’t let them dwell on it. He stepped back, crossing his arms as he stared down the ramp at Allura, and at the paladins ranged around behind her on the floor.

“I know I put myself in danger, okay? I knew that going in. And I don’t care.” He raised his voice as Matt began to speak, not allowing for any interruption. “I would do it again in a heartbeat—even knowing it was just one prisoner. There’s no way in _hell_ I’d ever leave that kid in Haggar’s hands. I’d rather die.”

No one pointed out that he nearly _had_ died. They were all too hung up on the rest of what Lance had said.

“Kid?”

It was Coran who spoke, but he knew he was voicing the thoughts of more than one of the others. Lance blinked, some of the hostility draining out of him as he nodded, glancing over his shoulder.

“Yeah. I think he’s a robeast pilot—or was. It looked ready to launch, too.” Lance shuddered, dropping his voice low. “If I’d waited until you guys finished with the rest of the fleet, Haggar probably would have sent the robeast in, and we’d have had to fight it. Kill it. We would’ve had to kill the kid.”

“Wait, hang on.” Keith held up a hand, his ears twitching nervously. “He’s a robeast pilot? Are we sure it’s safe to bring him on the castle-ship?”

Lance glared at him. “He’s a _kid_.”

“Yeah, a kid Haggar decided to weaponize.”

“The prisoners on Maorel didn’t know what they were doing,” Allura said, a little more evenly than Keith, but with the same edge. “They were victims, but they were victims trained to fight and to kill. How can you be certain the boy you rescued is not the same?”

Lance’s face darkened. “He’s traumatized, Allura. That doesn’t make him a threat. He’s hiding in Blue right now because he probably thinks we’re gonna run more sick experiments on him!”

He flung a hand behind him in a broad gesture meant to encompass all of Blue’s cockpit, but a pair of dark hands caught Lance’s between them and held tight. Lance jumped, then spun, softening the lines of his body and crouching down, even as he shifted, using his own body to hide the prisoner from the others.

“You okay, buddy?” Lance asked. “Look, don’t worry about anything. I’m gonna take care of you, all right? All right.” Lance turned, searching the hangar until his eyes found Coran. “He’s going to need a cryopod.”

Coran hesitated for only a moment, glancing at Allura and nearly expecting her to forbid it.

She didn’t, though, and Coran wasn’t about to let a child suffer, whether or not Haggar had conditioned him toward violence. He nodded, and Lance turned back toward the child, whispering too low for Coran to hear. This time when he stood up and turned around, he brought the boy with him.

The prisoner was young, a head and a half shorter than Lance and edging toward lanky, and he huddled against Lance’s side, clinging to Lance’s bodysuit as he darted nervous glances around the hangar, eyes sticking on Keith, Allura, and Coran before drifting back toward Keith. Lance kept a protective arm around him, glaring at the others like he expected a fight.

But Allura backed off as soon as she saw the boy—or, perhaps more meaningfully, saw his _glaes_.

Coran could hardly believe it himself, and he kept searching for something to say his first impression had been mistaken. A great many species had facial markings similar in appearance to the _glaes_ , if not often so close a match. A small subset of those species even had a body type the could be mistaken for Altean at first glance.

There was no denying it, though. This boy was not Tolumene or Flaugstan or Jeivish or even human. He _was_ Altean.

The floor tilted beneath Coran, and he nearly ran to the nearest command terminal to see if something had malfunctioned in the gravity generators. Nearly, except that his feet were rooted in place, his gaze fixed on the boy at Lance’s side. On the first Altean, aside from Allura, Coran had seen since emerging from stasis.

Proof positive that their people had survived the last ten thousand years.

“It’s you,” Keith breathed. Seeming surprised by the words coming out of his own mouth, he glanced around self-consciously.

“You know this kid?” Hunk asked.

Keith nodded. “Sendak captured him. Tried to force Shiro to fight him, but Shiro refused. He...” His eyes went back to the boy. “I thought he’d been executed.”

“Not quite,” said Lance, his face a grimace of pain that he tried to force toward a smile when he caught the boy looking at him.

A moment later, the boy’s green gaze slid back to Keith, who hesitated, then began moving toward the door. “Maybe I should go...”

Lance opened his mouth to argue, then stopped himself. He seemed to realize what Keith already had: this was not about whether or not Keith could be trusted. It was about making sure this boy, freshly rescued from a Galra ship, didn’t feel threatened. Coran patted Keith’s shoulder as he passed.

Keith hardly seemed to notice the gesture, just hurried out the door, Matt close behind him. Matt paused at the door only long enough to say, “We’ll wait for you guys up on the bridge. Once you get the kid settled, we should figure out how we’re going to get Shiro back.”

Then he was gone, his words leaving a grim aura hanging over the rest of the team. Coran glanced at Allura, then turned to address the other paladins. “It may be a good idea for all of you to wait on the bridge. Give the boy some space and all that.”

Pidge opened their mouth to protest, but Ryner put a hand atop their head to quiet them. “Of course,” she said. “We will take stock of our situation and see what our options are.” She turned, nudging Pidge ahead of her toward the door, and headed out into the corridor. Hunk followed, glancing at Shay, who hesitated.

“Perhaps I could...”

She didn’t finish, but Coran nodded. “We could use your insight,” he said. “Assuming that’s all right with… I’m sorry, my boy, I didn’t catch your name.”

The boy dropped his eyes to the ground and pressed, if possible, even closer to Lance’s side. Lance looked down at him, face pained, and gave his shoulders a brisk squeeze. “It’s okay, buddy. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.” He paused, as though hoping the boy would suddenly change his mind and start talking. When that didn’t happen, he nodded. “We’re gonna go get you cleaned up, okay? You ever been in a cryo-pod before?”

After a moment, the boy nodded. Coran watched him for signs of distress, too old and jaded to believe that there wasn’t at least a slim possibility that Haggar had turned healing tech into an agent of torture. But the boy didn’t tense up, just shuffled along beside Lance as they headed for the med bay, Lance keeping up a steady stream of chatter.

In all honesty, Coran was impressed. It was hard to miss the strain around Lance’s eyes, the way he hovered close to the boy, protectiveness radiating off him like light off a crystal. But his gait was loose and easy, his arm around the boy’s shoulders companionable rather than defensive, and his voice stayed bright.

Lance had mention his siblings once or twice—two of them, both younger than Lance. He didn’t speak of them often, as he didn’t speak about _Earth_ often. The homesickness was too strong, Coran supposed. But when the subject did come up, Lance’s love for his family was plain. Coran knew that, though he didn’t know much more. Mateo was older than Luz, and Lance had always looked out for them both, even when all three of them were young enough to be babysat by a family friend—someone Lance called Tía Lena. Ironically, Coran knew more about Lena than about Luz and Mateo.

They stopped first in the infirmary attached to the pod room, where Lance and the boy sat side-by-side on an exam table while Coran waved a scanner down the length of the boy’s body and Shay laid her hand on his head and closed her eyes.

Allura waited by the door, lifting one hand to her throat, then wincing and snatching it back. Coran glanced at her, then at the cryopod room, but she only shook her head.

Coran left it, for now. There would be time to deal with the fallout once the boy was good and squared away.

It took only moments for Shay to confirm what Coran’s scans had only been able to hint at. There was more synthetic Quintessence than organic inside the boy’s body, and though neither of them could find evidence of any physical damage, Shay had to suppress a shudder and Coran felt a sympathetic itch beneath his skin.

This was not natural.

They conferred briefly in low voices, away from the boy and Lance, who had launched into a story about _this one time, Tía Lena and me were chasing a stray cat and somehow we got stuck up a tree—_ _and t_ _hank_ God _Luz and Mateo were at Abuela So_ _f_ _ia’s that day,_ _or I’d never have heard the end of it._

Then Shay went back to them and began to cycle some of her own Quintessence into the boy, cleaning out Haggar’s corruption. Coran, meanwhile, grabbed a specimen jar from a small stasis chamber and headed over to the pod room, Allura following in his wake.

“How is he?” Allura asked. She kept her voice low, glancing back toward the infirmary as though checking to be sure no one was listening in.

Coran hesitated, setting the jar on the center console before crossing to one of the pods and popping off a side panel. “He’s been through a lot. Physically and emotionally, and that’s not counting the damage we can’t see yet.” Coran stared at the inner workings of the pod. They had some pretty sturdy shielding already—both to keep Quintessence inside, where it could do the patient some good, and to keep outside interference away.

“But he’ll recover.”

Coran sat back on his heels, pursing his lips. “I certainly hope so.”

They were silent for several minutes as Coran prepared the pod, then wired in some of the smaller crystals Shay had collected from Matt. It had worked for drawing out the synthetic Quintessence from Shiro’s arm, so it ought to work for this, if Coran could get it set up right.

He’d finished and was in the middle of replacing the exterior panel when Allura spoke again.

“He’s Altean.”

Coran met her eyes. It might have seemed an obvious statement to make, except that Coran found himself just as astounded about it as Allura. An _Altean_. Here. Alive. Coran kept expecting to blink and find out this had all been some sort of deathbed hallucination.

“He’s Altean,” Coran said, and somehow saying the words made them feel more real. Made the boy’s presence feel more real.

Allura wrapped her arms around herself, her eyes fixed on the infirmary door. “Do you think he came from New Altea?”

Coran said nothing. It wasn’t that he hadn’t considered the possibility, wasn’t even that he thought Allura was wrong—because he _did_ , in fact, think this boy had come from some remnant of the culture Zarkon had destroyed ten thousand years ago.

He stayed quiet precisely _because_ he felt so sure of his assumptions. He was not so foolish as to be unable to recognize wishful thinking. He believed the boy was from New Altea because he wanted it to be true, not because he had any proof to support the theory. He might as easily have come from a smaller band of Altean survivors roaming the universe alone. He might have come from a rebellion like Anamuri’s, a haven for stragglers and outcasts of all stripes. He might not even know where he’d come from. Orphans making their own way in the universe were not uncommon in wartime, and Haggar could have easily found him wandering the Empire, chased by rumors about his heritage.

“I don’t know,” Coran said. “I hope he is, but there’s no way to be certain until he’s recovered enough to tell us his story.”

Allura had time to nod once, her face contorted in a struggle between hope and agony. Then the others came in, the boy—no longer dressed in Lance’s armor—still clinging to Lance’s hand, Shay hovering nearby and glancing up at Coran, a silent question in her eyes. He nodded, and she touched Lance’s elbow.

“All right, buddy,” Lance said as the boy slowed. “You ready for this?”

The boy stared at the cryopod for a long moment, then turned to Lance. “Are you leaving?” he asked in a hushed voice.

Lance seemed taken aback by the question and swiftly dropped into a crouch, holding the boy by both shoulders. “No way. I’ve got to take care of paladin business while you’re resting, but I’ll be right here waiting for you when you wake up. Pinky promise.”

He held up his little finger in a gesture Coran didn’t recognize. Nor did the boy, from the looks of it. Faltering, Lance turned toward Coran and Allura.

“There wouldn’t happen to be an Altean version of a pinky promise, would there?”

Allura frowned, and Coran just shrugged helplessly.

Lance fluttered a hand. “Never mind.” He held up his little finger once more, then gently hooked it around the boy’s pinky. “It’s an Earth thing, okay? It means this is a promise I can’t break.”

The boy stared at him, smiling faintly, then turned and stepped into the cryopod. Coran initiated the healing sequence, then watched for a few moments to ensure the pod was extracting the synthetic Quintessence—slowly, so as not to put unnecessary stress of the boy’s body.

“Now, we wait,” he said at length.

Allura nodded. “Lance?”

Lance hummed distractedly, his gaze lingering on the boy, still visible through a haze of frost on the inside of the pod.

“I wanted to apologize.”

Lance gave a start and turned toward her. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Allura said. “For the way I acted. Losing Shiro… it wasn’t your fault. I was… upset, and I spoke rashly.”

“It’s fine.” Lance ran a hand through his hair and plastered a thin smile on his face. “Let’s just focus on getting him back.”

* * *

It didn’t take long for Pidge to lose themself in the code from Shiro’s arm. They had a copy on their laptop, their bridge station, and the computer in their paladin armor—all linked to each other so annotations made on one would be copied to the rest. So when Pidge, Hunk, and Ryner joined Matt and Keith on the bridge, Pidge spared only enough attention to be mildly surprised at the fact that Keith _was_ here, and not beating up a gladiator on the training deck, before plopping down at their station and pulling up the file they’d named _Haggar-_ _bullshit_.

They knew it was useless, of course. After all, they’d been poking at the same problem for three weeks now, and hadn’t made a single breakthrough.

Okay, fine. They’d figured out some things, like how to break the arm in twenty different ways. But that would only ruin the arm’s functionality, make it immobile or stop it from activating the weapon mode. None of it would break Haggar’s control over Shiro if, as Pidge believed, the override was its own process within the arm. The only thing they’d found so far that they could be sure would do that was a manual disconnect, and Pidge sincerely doubted Haggar would let Shiro sit still long enough for Hunk or Matt to go digging around in there.

So Pidge _had_ to figure this out. There was an override somewhere in the code, and if Pidge could find it, the team could put this whole nightmare behind them.

 _If_ they found it, and _if_ they could remotely hack Shiro’s arm, and _if_ the could find him and get him back so that Haggar didn’t simply kill him once he was free from her influence.

Groaning, Pidge scanned the code, slowly scrolling through the file in search of something they’d missed on every previous pass. Their eyes stung and their head pounded and they couldn’t for the life of them remember the last time they’d got a full night’s rest (not since finding out about the override, that was for certain.)

They kept working anyway.

Hunk and Ryner stood nearby, not quite touching Pidge, but resting hands on their chair and hovering just inside their personal bubble. It was _nothing._  It was _fine_. Pidge could just _ignore them—_ but their physical presence pressed at them, a tangible pressure on the back of their neck as they watched, bodies tense, breathing shallow and loud, too loud for Pidge’s hypersensitive state.

“Anything I can do to help?” Hunk asked at length, and Pidge was grateful they hadn’t had to be the one to broach the subject.

“No,” they said shortly. “I just need space.”

They were aware, in an abstract sort of way, that it was rude to brush off an offer of help like that. They were also aware that they could have screamed at him, so a little brusqueness wasn’t too far out of line, all things considered. They _did_ need space, and Hunk _couldn’t_ help.

Keith was pacing on the far side of the bridge—another minor distraction that shouldn’t have been a big deal. But the sound of his footsteps hit Pidge like the little puffs of air the optometrist used to test for glaucoma: alone, it was a small, trivial thing, but it slipped between Pidge’s mental defenses and made them flinch with every hollow, metallic _clomp_.

Back and forth, clomp, clomp, turn on his heel, clomp. Growl his frustration, then start it all over again.

He should just go punch a wall or something.

Words drifted through Pidge’s awareness, rarely more than a fly buzzing on the edge of comprehension.

“We’re going to find him. We _are_.” Matt, sitting at the red paladin’s station, his head in his hands, glancing up every now and then to watch Keith’s progress around the bridge.

“Are we?” Hunk, still too close to Pidge, his nervous energy turning the air firecracker bright. “We don’t even know where she took him. What if we never see him again? What if he’s already dead? What if she’s experimenting on him again? What if she sent him to go attack some innocent people? What if--?”

“ _Shut up._ ” Keith. He hardly broke the stream of muttered… Galran? Pidge didn’t think the ship was translating it, whatever it was, maybe because it was too low for them to hear. Whatever it was, he barely paused long enough to snap at Hunk, who flinched so violently Pidge could feel it in their bones, a shudder in their concentration.

 _Be quiet,_ they wanted to say. _Everyone just shut up and let me focus._ They wanted to leave. Wanted to barricade themself in the Green Lion and forget the rest of the universe existed until they had this problem worked out. No food, no sleep, no worry, no people to distract them.

But Allura would be here soon, and once she was they were all going to put together a plan to save Shiro. Pidge had to be here for that.

So they kept their mouth shut and tried to focus on the screen, even as every sniffle, footfall, and muttered curse tugged their mind away from the issue at hand. Ryner was trying to calm them all, redirect their restless energy toward analyzing the situation, and Pidge would have agreed with her if they hadn’t been pulled so tight they felt like the slightest slip would shatter them.

By the time Allura arrived with the others, Matt was chewing on a hangnail, staring blankly at the floor, Hunk was all but hyperventilating in the yellow paladin’s chair, Keith’s pacing had taken him to the very front of the bridge, where he’d finally given in and punched a console (not that it looked any worse for the wear afterwards.)

Only Ryner reacted to the new arrivals, breathing out a sigh of relief and yielding her place at the center of the storm to Allura. Pidge was aware of all this—they couldn’t _not_ be, as high-strung as they were. Every little sound or movement twanged their senses like a fly disturbing a spider’s web.

But their perception worked indiscriminately. Pidge noticed Allura’s quick, heavy gait as she stepped up, noticed the steely self-control in her clipped voice as she started to speak. But they also noticed the hiccup in Hunk’s breathing as he latched onto her determination, saw Keith whirl around to face her, felt the tap-tap-tap of Matt’s foot on the floor as a vibration in their own leg.

They were bouncing their leg. They didn’t remember starting, but stopping now would have taken far more mental effort than they had in them.

“But he’ll recover?”

Ryner’s question slid into a gap in Pidge’s scattershot hyperfixation, and they realized the others had been carrying on a conversation without them. Eyes staring through the code still displayed on their screen, they tried to figure out who Ryner was talking about.

“We think so,” Allura said. “It’s difficult to be certain what all Haggar put him through, but Coran says...”

She hesitated—glancing toward Coran, Pidge thought—and Pidge’s mind finally caught up to the conversation.

The Altean boy.

“He’s… not in _great_ shape,” Coran said tentatively. “A lot of relatively minor wounds the cryopod will have fixed up in no time. He’s malnourished, too, but that will have to wait until he wakes up. The worst of it is the synthetic Quintessence in his system.”

This last bit snapped Pidge out of their haze, and they spun, gaping at Coran. “ _Synthetic Q_?” they demanded. “But that’s--” _Project Robeast._ Well, _duh_. Lance had said the kid was a pilot. Of _course_ he had synthetic Q in him; Pidge had read enough of the logs from Maorel to know that much, but… “Synthetic Q rots the body. That’s why the pilots on Maorel were in stasis. Was this kid--”

“No,” Lance said before Pidge could finish their question. “No, they just had him in a cell.”

They turned to Coran, who held up his hands. “Maybe they’d only just taken him out of stasis for this battle? I don’t know, Pidge.”

“He had maintained some of his own Quintessence,” Shay offered. She’d gone to sit with Hunk, her hand glowing as she rubbed his back. He seemed to be breathing easier now, so that was good, Pidge supposed. “Perhaps that helped him somehow?”

Coran ran his fingers through his hair, which was looking rather more limp than usual. “It’s possible. Alteans can control the flow of Quintessence in their own body better than most species. He might have consciously drawn in organic Quintessence from the ship’s crystal to offset the damage from what Haggar gave him. I don’t suppose we’ll know for sure until the boy is able to tell us himself.”

“Then why _are_ we talking about it?” Keith demanded. He’d rejoined the group, his ears flat against his skull, his eyes narrowed to luminous slits. Pidge glanced at his hand and saw violet blood glistening on his knuckles where he’d punched the console. “Shiro’s still out there. We’re supposed to be figuring out how to get him back!”

Hunk flinched and Pidge felt an unpleasant jolt rush up their spine. It could have been from Keith’s sharp tone, or from the reminder that Shiro was back in Haggar’s clutches, or from the pained looks staring back at them from around the room. Everything was a whirl of restless nerves and overlapping trains of thought right now, and Pidge wasn’t sure they’d ever be able to sort out the knot of emotions tangling them up inside.

Allura, thank _god_ , maintained her usual level of calm, staring at Keith until he mumbled an apology and backed off. “You’re right,” she said then. “The first thing to do is examine our options.”

“Options?” Matt echoed. Pidge didn’t like how hollow his voice sounded. Hollow and cold, and his face set with displeasure as he stared up at Allura. “We’re going to rescue him. What ‘options’ are there?”

“You’re not seriously thinking about abandoning him, are you?” Keith added.

Allura bristled. “Of course not. I mean _how_ are we going to get him back? I’m sure you’re both itching to blast through Haggar’s shields and take him by force, but I want to make sure that’s the best plan before we commit to it.”

Matt deflated, his gaze returning to the ground and, grumbling under his breath, Keith went back to pacing. With a sigh, Allura turned her attention to the other paladins.

“Would Haggar be open to a trade?” Ryner asked, then held up her hands and Keith and Lance both shot her dark looks. “A question only. I am less familiar with the woman than the rest of you.”

Lance ran his hands down his face, breathing out sharply. “She’s not exactly the negotiating type. Even if we _had_ something else she wanted more than Shiro, I wouldn’t count on her to follow through.”

“Perhaps, then, a distraction would be best,” said Shay. “Could we not send word to Rolo and Nyma, ask them to sneak in to rescue Shiro while we stage an assault to draw off Haggar’s forces?”

Lance wrinkled his nose, but he didn’t immediately shoot down the suggestion, much to Pidge’s surprise. They wouldn’t have thought Lance would trust Nyma with anything, much less Shiro’s life. “While we’re on the subject,” he said. “What about the Accords? That Hythan person asked us to stage a jailbreak, and, sure, it didn’t go _great—_ but if they’re serious about an alliance, maybe they’d be willing to have some of their spies help us out.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have a way to contact the Accords,” Allura said. “The channels they used to contact us are not secure. The Accords may not even have access to them any longer.”

“Setting up anything with anyone is going to take too long,” Keith said. “Whatever Haggar’s going to do to him, she’s going to do fast. We need to find him _now_.”

Keith didn’t go quite so far as to say he’d go after Shiro alone if the others failed to move fast enough, but the implication was clear. Pidge was pretty sure Matt would go with him, if it came to it, but he was still something of a blank—obviously paying attention to the conversation, but barely participating. His eyes had a faraway look that reminded Pidge far too much of the first days after they’d found him, when he still seemed to see Vel-17 everywhere he looked.

Allura might have trusted Rolo and Nyma with the rescue—though maybe not the faceless strangers of the Accords—but from the stubborn set of her jaw she wouldn’t have been happy about it. Keith and Matt gave her all the excuse she needed to reject the idea.

“All right,” she said. “So we either need to figure out where Haggar has gone, or we need to figure out a way to lure Haggar into the open—with Shiro—so we can strike at them on our terms.”

“As much as I’d like to be able to pick the battlefield,” said Lance, looking thoughtful, “I don’t think we _can_ be certain Haggar will bring Shiro. She’ll know he’s our goal; why would she risk him like that? Unless she’s already so sure of her control that she doesn’t think it’s a risk.”

Pidge sat up straight, seizing the purpose Lance was all but dangling in front of their nose. “Then we need to track them down,” they said, already turning back to their screen. They hesitated for only a second before closing out of the window displaying the arm’s code. That was a futile hope anyway. “I’ll find us somewhere we can plug into the main Galra network. A comms hub or command center or something. Give me thirty minutes.”

“Fine,” said Keith, then turned to Allura. “Then that means you and Lance have time to jump in the cryopods.”

Lance opened his mouth, and Pidge thought he was going to protest just on the principle of the thing, but then he stopped, rubbing his shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, that actually might be a good idea.”

Keith nodded, his eyes never leaving Allura, who stared back at him, unimpressed.

"I don’t need a cryopod.”

Keith growled, a low sound startlingly similar a stressed cat. They turned to stare at him—and Pidge wasn’t the only one. Even Lance, who had already turned to head for the door, stopped.

Keith ignored them all. “This isn’t about you.”

“Isn’t--” Allura stopped herself just short of shouting and took a deep breath. “My life is not in jeopardy, Keith, and we need everyone to prepare for this mission. As you yourself said, time is of the essence.”

“And you’re not going to _do_ anything between now and when Pidge finds us a target.”

Hunk frowned at Keith, his brow furrowed in thought. “Since when are you such a mother hen?”

Pidge couldn’t see the look Keith gave Hunk from where they sat, but it made Hunk recoil, holding his hands up in front of him in surrender.

“Allura,” he said, obviously struggling for calm. “If you care about Shiro as much as I think you do, you’ll get in the cryopod.”

Allura shook her head. “I’ve had far worse than this, Keith, I assure you--”

“You have Shiro’s handprint _burned into your vrekking throat,_ Allura!” Keith’s voice was raw, his hands flying wide in a gesture that paralyzed Pidge where they sat. He was shaking, and not, Pidge realized, from anger. He was _scared._ Pidge didn’t think they’d ever seen Keith this scared before. “What do you think it’s going to do to him if he comes back and has to look at that scar for the rest of his life?”

He looked around, waiting for someone to answer him, but the other paladins remained silent and wide-eyed. It seemed none of them had considered that before. Pidge certainly hadn’t, though they felt stupid now for not having seen it.

Letting his arms drop to his side, Keith exhaled. “Anything that happens to us. Any scar, any wound, any little scratch—Shiro is going to blame himself. You know that, right?” His gaze fell on Pidge, and they looked quickly back to their screen. “I’m trying to _save_ Shiro, not kill him with guilt over things he has no control over. So _please_ , Allura, take care of that now, before it has a chance to scar.”

Pidge wasn’t at all surprised when Allura followed Lance out of the room without another word.

* * *

“Naomi just texted. It sounds like something’s going on downtown tonight.”

Akani looked up as Akira entered the kitchen. Karen leaned her head in from the living room, where she was working on something with Eli. Neither of them had told Lana or Akani what had them so distracted, but whatever it was, it soured their hushed conversation.

 _Iverson_ , Akani guessed.

“Naomi?” Lana asked.

Akira looked up at her, blinking a few times like he’d forgot Karen had more house guests now. The Kahales had taken over the queen bed in Matt’s old room, displacing Akira to Pidge’s twin. He’d offered to sleep on the couch, claiming it felt like an invasion of Pidge’s privacy to go in there without their permission, but Karen had insisted.

 _They adored you,_ Karen had said, smiling wanly. _I’m sure they wouldn’t mind._

Akani wondered whether anyone else had noticed the way Karen talked about Pidge in the past tense.

“Oh,” Akira said now, waving his phone vaguely. “She’s a… friend, I guess you could say. She works at the Garrison. Saved my life once.”

“She sends us info she thinks might be useful,” Eli added, the sound of clacking keys underscoring his voice. He trailed off, the sudden silence broken only by Karen’s muttered oath.

Akira’s brow furrowed. “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

“A memorial,” said Eli. “For the kids.”

There was no question of whether or not they would go. For Hunk—for her _son_ , Akani would have done just about anything, and a forty-five minute drive to the heart of downtown Carlsbad was a small price indeed.

The drive was quiet, Akani leaning on Lana’s shoulder as the darkening sky closed in around them. City lights stood out like stars, and Akani was struck by how impersonal the city seemed, despite the crowded streets and car horns and shouted conversations passing them by in snatches.

The memorial, in contrast, seemed somehow intimate. The crowd had taken over a city park, cell phones and candles lighting up as the sun passed the horizon. There were too many people there to count—far more than Akani had expected—and it took less than a minute for someone to recognize Karen and Akira. Eli’s face was not as well known, but the crowd knew his name, and more than one person offered Lana and Akani hugs or simple smiles once they were introduced.

It was surreal, Akani thought, that so many strangers should know her son’s name.

Whispered conversations drifted around them, Akira and Karen both pausing to speak with families of Garrison students and sympathetic strangers. Eli led Akani and Lana onward, and eventually they came to the center of the crowd, where oversized photographs of Hunk, Lance, Pidge, and Val had been set up. Candles, flowers, handwritten notes, and other tokens littered the ground around the photos, and the sight of it stirred up grief Akani had thought she’d put behind her.

To one side of the shrine, not far from Pidge’s photo, a secondary memorial had sprung up, much smaller than the first, but nearly buried by the tokens that had been laid beside it. Curious, Akani drifted toward it, blinking back tears as she knelt to peer at the photo—three men in Garrison uniforms standing in front of a shuttle, the shortest in the middle with his arm around his two companions.

“The crew of the _Persephone_ ,” said a voice in her ear.

She turned and found Akira standing there, his face pinched. Even in the darkness, Akani could see his resemblance to the tall man on the left. Takashi’s face was more square than his brother’s, his shoulders broader, his hair shorter—but they had the same eyes, and the same smile.

Not that Akira was smiling now. He stood stiff and straight, and he closed his eyes as though he was pained.

“I didn’t think anyone remembered him anymore,” he said, his voice soft.

Akani’s heart went out to him. Hard enough to lose a member of your family. Hard enough, Akani was learning, to have the nation claim that loss as their own. But the _Persephone_ had faded from the collective consciousness after just a few weeks, and then her crew might as well have never lived.

Standing, Akani laid a hand on Akira’s arm, and he offered her a thin smile. “They shouldn’t spring stuff like this on me,” he said, eyes shimmering. “It’s a cheap shot.”

His laugh didn’t convince either of them, but Akani just wrapped him in a hug. “I won’t let him be forgotten,” she whispered. “I won’t let any of them be forgotten. I promise you that.”

* * *

Matt was getting good at compartmentalization.

Shiro was missing, probably being tortured, at the very least experimented on. The team was falling apart. They’d all rushed headlong into the first Galra communication hub Pidge had found on the long-range scanners.

And all Matt could think about was the fact that he’d just struck down his sixteenth enemy of the day. Blood dripped from the tip of his sword, a vibrant, unnatural purple that looked black in certain lights. There were shouts around him, and Pidge was saying something about finding a computer terminal, but Matt didn’t hear them.

Under other circumstances, he might have been concerned. But his concern was locked away with his fear and his guilt and the part of him that had plunged back into the murky depths of Vel-17 when he watched Haggar vanish, her claws digging into Shiro’s shoulder.

_Fire in his bones. Claws gripping his chin as the researcher forced him to look up into yellow eyes._

Compartmentalize.

Matt seized the memory in bloody hands and hurled it into the dark recesses of his brain as he cut a sentry in two. Keith, ahead of him, was fighting with even more blind fury, his energy sword sizzling and spotted dark with the residue from flash-boiled blood.

Pidge and Allura led the charge, but only because Matt and Keith had taken up the rear guard, holding off the guards who were trying to stop them from reaching the computer bays and finding out where Haggar had taken Shiro.

_Shiro’s scar, stark white, turned red with fresh blood, and more lines of liquid fire appeared across his skin. He screamed, writhing under Haggar’s touch, writhing as Matt had writhed under the scalpels of the researchers on Vel-17. His eyes lost their spark, darkened to a dull, empty gray before the lambent yellow film closed over them once more._

A Galra shattered Matt’s guard, throwing him to the ground as more scenes flashed through his mind, a confusion of memories of his own torture and nightmares of Shiro’s and horrifying thoughts of what he might be suffering even now. His body forgot how to breathe, forgot how to move, and he curled in on himself, legs pulling up toward his chest, arms curling around his head as he braced himself for a beating from the guards.

_It’s not real._

_You’re not there._

_Compartmentalize._

Someone roared, lights flashed, and by the time Matt forced himself to uncurl Hunk was standing over him, mowing down Galra with his bayard as Keith fell back, panting for breath, his hands shaking, his armor spotted with blood. Matt couldn’t tell how much of it was his own.

Hunk was crouched in front of Matt, worried eyes trained on his face, before Matt realized the corridor had gone silent.

“Are you okay?”

Cursing himself, Matt stood, pain flaring in his knee—crystals and scar awakened by his memories and lending their own nightmares to the ones pounding inside his skull. He couldn’t afford this. He needed to focus. _Shiro_ needed him to focus.

Pushing away Hunk’s hands, Matt turned and stalked toward the door where the others had gathered. Limped toward the door, really, but he would never admit that.

Shay and Ryner had stayed in the air with the Yellow and Green Lions, ready to crash through the roof for a quick rescue, so it was just Lance, Pidge, and Allura waiting for him, Pidge’s attention on the lock as they set Rover to hacking, Lance and Allura scanning the hallway. Both glanced at Matt as he approached, and he steadfastly ignored their attention.

His head felt stuffed full of memories and dreams that shouted for his attention, straining at the walls of the boxes he’d built to contain them. One push, it seemed, and he’d be drowning in them, drowning in the darkness he’d fought so hard to crawl out of. He’d thought he’d banished it, but all it had taken was losing Shiro, and the darkness had poured right back in through the cracks in his armor, filling him up from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, a quicksand pit of old pain and new fear and a gaping hole inside him where Shiro should have been.

He blinked, and Pidge was inside the room, Hunk and Lance with them, and Allura was watching him with something very much like pity.

He turned away from her.

“We’ll find him,” Allura whispered. At least Keith was there beside him. At least Matt could pretend it was Keith she needed to reassure.

He breathed, and packed more dirt down on top of the bones of his past until he was left with a smooth, still plane of dark soil. Grave dirt, perhaps, but undisturbed.

He was getting too good at compartmentalizing, and not good enough.

When Allura laid a hand on his arm, the hard-packed earth inside him began to crumble, but before he could be swept away in a landslide of emotion Pidge was crowing triumph from within the computer bay.

“I’ve got him!” they cried, a relieved tremble in their voice. “I know where he is.”

Lance breathed out, long and shuddering. “Great job, Pidge. Now let’s go get him back.”


	19. The Heart of a Lion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Voltron was reeling from the loss of Shiro, and tensions ran high as they tried to find a way to get him back. It was Keith, of all people, who reminded them of the need for caution: whatever wounds they sustain in this fight, Shiro will blame himself. Barely an hour after the battle for the Kera Sector, the team hit a Galra outpost and found Shiro's location. Now it's time to bring him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Popping in here with a quick reminder that this fic has a warning for violence for a reason. This isn't objectively the bloodiest chapter to date, but where this arc is concerned, everything's personal. Also there's... a lot of general emotional distress... here and moving forward.
> 
> It's a heavy chapter. Come yell at me on tumblr ([@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com)) if you need a break from the angst. I might be persuaded to write some apology fluff ficlets. ;)

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #513  
>  Dated three and a half months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Prisoner 682-9875* was the most extensively-modified test subject to date not belonging to a feral species. Behavioral modification and extensive neurological enhancements created an impressive warrior out of what is otherwise a predominantly pacifist species. The success on this front is due largely to advancements founded on observations of the feral-type subjects transferred here from Vel-17.
> 
> Yesterday Lord Zarkon called Prisoner 682-9875 to Commander Sendak’s ship for a special assignment. Despite performing to expectations, the subject was killed by Prisoner 117-9875, informally referred to as “Champion.” 117-9875 has begun preliminary modification while Lady Haggar petitions Lord Zarkon to transfer him to Project Robeast.

*Pidge’s note: Keith recognizes the description of this prisoner as a Balmeran who fought in the Arena. None one knows anything else about them, including their name. I’ve decided to call them Zakar.

* * *

Inside the Black Lion was darkness unbroken by any star.

It was not the void of space, nor the shadows of sleep, nor a cloud of uncertainty or indecision.

This darkness was the darkness of a mind at rest. Tranquil, confident, unbothered by the worries of the physical world.

A light blossomed in the darkness, and two minds shied away from it. In this space, light was an intruder. In this space, light blinded. You could not see the deep truth when your eyes were attuned to the brighter, more fleeting games of truth and lie that mortals played.

_I am mortal._

The Black Lion rumbled at this assertion. Mortality had no foothold here. This was the deep, dark well at the center of the Black Lion’s soul, and only that part of her paladins which was immortal could enter here. That part of her paladins that lived on in her spirit after their bodies had passed away.

 _I am not yet dead,_ Allura reminded the Black Lion. _My body sleeps within yours._

_**I have no body. I am the sky.** _

Allura sighed—a pale imitation of what it would have been in the living world, and not nearly a sufficient expression of her impatience. Her father had taught her about the Hearts of the Lions—immaterial planes connected to each of the five lions and accessible only to paladins who had surrendered themselves entirely to the bond.

Alfor had told her of the Hearts’ existence, but he had no more first-hand experience with them than did anyone now living. The lions may have permitted him to pilot them, but he was not a paladin. This space did not belong to him.

It didn’t belong to Allura, either; she was a stranger here, and her presence rankled the Black Lion with uncomfortable reminders that not all were as vast and still as she.

 _I’m sorry,_ Allura said, willing the words into being. There was no sound here, any more than there was heat or motion. Just darkness, stillness, and the occasional star bursting into life and then dying as Allura remembered why she had come here.

Shiro.

Thoughts of Shiro set off a cascade in the sky overhead—it _was_ overhead, and Allura had a body, or something like it. She stood on solid ground covered in a thin layer of water so still it reflected the sky overhead with all its millions of stars. Reaching up, Allura could almost touch them. They exploded as she turned her mind toward them, white pinpricks spilling over with the colors of a nebula as she remembered.

_A hand on her neck._

_Yellow eyes._

_A laugh, dry and rasping, as Haggar took him away._

_Tears. Shouting. A hole in the heart of the castle where her partner should have been._

The Black Lion crooned, the non-sound rising inside Allura’s body like a tide, building upon itself more and more until she was sure she could not hold it without breaking.

_**Help him.** _

_I’m trying,_ Allura said. _That’s why I’m here._

Her plan spooled out above her, reflected in the water around her feet, and a gusting wind ruffled the surface of the great glass sea.

Allura turned and found the Black Lion looming over her. They had emerged from the Heart now, come into a liminal space at the joining of paladin and lion. Black did not face Allura directly, and Allura turned to the place where her gaze fell.

The sea calmed, and there, at a point equidistant from both Allura and the Black Lion, there was a hole in the reflected stars. Perfectly round, infinitely dark, it seemed a shadow cast by an invisible body. A sense of familiarity and peace emanated from the dark hole.

_**Help him.** _

Allura could not cry in this space, but she desperately wanted to. She could sense Shiro out there, somewhere among the stars. Distance or Haggar’s influence kept her from finding him, but she knew he was still alive. She knew his mind was still his own, even if it was plunged beneath the surface of Haggar’s control.

 _You helped me once,_ Allura said to Black, her eyes still trained on the void in the heavens. _On Berlou. Haggar tried to seize control of him, and you connected us somehow. I helped him fight her off._

She came close to asking the question then, the question she’d come here to ask. But she hesitated, and new stars were born overhead. The water beneath her seemed almost radiant with their light.

The Black Lion understood, of course. She was the aspect of spirit, as Green was the aspect of mind and Blue of heart. She understood without words and saw without sight, and she shivered, adding her own stars to the constellations above.

 _**It will be dangerous,** _ the Black Lion said. A star as bright as any moon appeared on the horizon, stinging Allura’s eyes with its light. She blinked, and caught a glimpse of death—her own, she thought, though it might have been Shiro’s. They were so closely tied together in the Black Lion’s mind it was difficult to tell them apart.

 _I am not afraid,_ Allura said.

 _**It will not be easy.** _ A band of stars like a silver sash streaked across the sky, each a whisper of pain, of fear, of loss. Allura’s mind could not hold them all, but she knew each star represented something that could go wrong with this plan.

Allura looked her lion in the eyes as the night lit up around them. _I will fight for him._

_**You may lose yourself.** _

More stars, thousands upon thousands, _millions upon millions_ , appeared, overlapping, bleeding together, until all around was white, white, white except for Allura, and the Black Lion, and the dark hole in the sky with its reflection on the water beside Allura.

_I’ll lose Shiro if I do nothing._

Suddenly, the lights went out, plunging Allura into darkness so deep she wondered whether she herself had simply ceased to be. She could not feel the ground beneath her, or the water lapping at her feet. But she sensed the Black Lion as a rumble in her chest, and she sensed the comforting, agonizing hole where Shiro had been. Would be again.

 _**We must help him,** _ the Black Lion said, a note of finality in her words. _**Go. I will give you what aid I can.** _

* * *

Allura came back to herself slowly. She sat in the Black Lion’s cockpit, in the Black Lion’s hangar. The aches of battle hit her first—a low burn throughout her body from the fight on the Galra command ship as Pidge hacked the sentry beacon; a slight tenderness in her neck where Shiro ( _not_ Shiro) had nearly strangled her; a sharper, fresher pain in her hip from where she’d taken a fall in the middle of their hasty recon mission.

She could see, now, that she’d let her fear get the better of her. Communing with the Black Lion had reestablished some of her usual calm, and she almost regretted letting the younger paladins sweep her up in their frantic rush to find Shiro.

Almost, except that she knew it had been necessary.

It had been less than three hours since Shiro had been taken, but every minute seemed an eternity. Allura checked the ticker in her armor and saw that only a short time had passed since she’d sent the other paladins up to the bridge ahead of her and delved into the Heart of the Black Lion.

She would have done it no matter what, of course, but she was glad she hadn’t given the others much time to worry about her.

Patting Black’s console, Allura stood (how strange it was to sit in the pilot’s chair once more, when for the last several weeks she’d mostly stayed at her own station just behind Shiro’s) and headed for the exit. At the bottom of the ramp she slowed, catching sight of her reflection in the shiny silver metal of Black’s muzzle.

Hesitating only a moment, Allura removed her helmet, then tugged at the black undersuit until her neck was bare. She’d checked it earlier, of course, after she emerged from the brief healing cycle in the cryopod, but she couldn’t help thinking that she’d convinced herself the burn had healed more than it truly had.

But when she tilted her head just right, she saw that her memory was mostly accurate. There were still three small, shiny burns—still slightly pinkish at the center, but edged in smooth brown scar tissue where the cryopod had nearly completed its work. It no longer resembled a handprint so much as welts sustained from a training rifle.

Guilt welled up in her. She should have realized what this wound would do to Shiro without needing Keith to spell it out for her. She’d linked with Shiro often enough to know him inside and out; she knew how he had felt— _still_ felt—about the other people he’d failed to save. On Yaltin, on Maorel, even in the Arena.

He blamed himself even when he’d had no choice in the matter. Maybe especially then.

She willed some of her Quintessence toward the burns and watched as they healed a bit more. They’d already begun to scar, of course, so it was too late to completely erase what Haggar had done through Shiro, but she would minimize it as much as she could.

“You still worried about that?”

Allura nearly jumped out of her skin at the sound of Lance’s voice. She spun toward him, tugging the collar of her undersuit up toward her chin even as she did so. “Lance! What are you doing here?”

She realized too late how that might sound. They hadn’t talked on the way down to the cryopod room earlier, and Lance had already been gone by the time Coran ended Allura’s cycle. She wondered if he was still upset at her for blaming him for what happened.

She wondered if he still blamed himself.

He stalled several paces away, staring at his shoes, and Allura expelled her tension on an exhale. Well, as much of her tension as she could, given the situation. “I’m sorry,” she said, clasping her hands at her waist. “You startled me.”

“Sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were holding up all right. You seemed… distracted.”

 _Distracted._ What he meant was that Allura looked like she was walking an edge, but he thought she might shatter completely if he said so outright. Meri had done the same thing the day after Allura sat vigil for her mother. The castle had been too cold, the air thick with the kind of grief that bit into you and tore. Meri had found her sitting in the shadow of the Blue Lion and had joined her without a word. She didn’t acknowledge the thousand other things Allura should have been doing instead of drowning her grief in her mother’s lion. Meri’s lion, by then.

_I figured I’d find you here. You seemed distracted when you left. I thought maybe you’d want some company._

Neither Meri nor Lance was wrong to worry about her.

Sometimes Allura saw so much of Meri, and of Lealle, in Lance that it seared her to the core. Sometimes, like now, she was glad for it. She sighed, letting her shoulders slump, and when Lance wrapped her in an embrace she didn’t fight it.

“He’s been through enough already,” she whispered. Lance didn’t have to ask who she meant. “I wish… I wish I could take his place.”

“Me too.” Lance ducked his head, and Allura realized his hands were shaking. “When it was just me and Haggar in that control booth, you know what I thought? I thought, if this was a trap for Shiro, I’m glad I sprang it before Haggar got her claws on him.”

He laughed, a diamond-edged sound.

“Guess I can’t even play the sacrifice right.”

Allura pulled back, staring at him in horror. “Lance...”

Feeling the change in mood, Lance straightened up. A mask slid down over his features, all cocky smiles and twinkling eyes and a generous swagger in every line of his body. This was the Lance she’d seen more often than any other these last few months, but it _was_ a mask this time. Maybe it always had been.

“Anyway,” Lance said, before Allura could figure out how, and _what_  to say.  _Play the sacrifice?_ What was that supposed to mean? “We should get going up to the bridge, if you’re all set? Pidge wants to brief us, and I think the Red Duo might start smashing windows if we don’t find some druids for them to take their anger out on soon.”

They needed to talk about this, about Lance. Allura knew that, knew there were wounds that had been festering here for too long without anyone seeing them, but she was in no state for a heart-to-heart. Shiro was missing, and the team needed Allura to be strong.

Lance’s fingertips ghosted along her elbow, a gesture at once comforting and commiserating. Their eyes locked, and Lance’s smile said he understood.

He seemed far older than he’d been that first day when she’d fallen out of the cryopod into his arms. That boy—the incorrigible flirt, the jokester who wanted no part of the staggering duty laid at his feet, who seemed incapable of taking anything seriously… That boy was gone, and Allura wondered how she hadn’t noticed the change.

“Are you ready?” Lance asked.

Allura nodded, grieving what her fellow paladins had lost in taking up this mantle—but grief would have to wait. Shiro needed them now.

“I’m ready,” she said, and followed Lance to the elevator.

* * *

Carmen Mendoza was tired of grieving.

It had only been two months since Lance’s death, but those two months felt as though they spanned a lifetime. Two long months full of paparazzi, memorials, well-wishes from strangers, the death of Carmen’s daughter, a mostly-silent feud with Karen Holt…

It was too much.

When Akani Kahale called her up out of the blue, Carmen had come within inches of hanging up on her. (As it happened, Carmen’s sister-in-law Rosario _had_ hung up on Akani not ten minutes earlier.)

Akani couldn’t have known she was calling on Lance’s birthday. It was just one of those divine mysteries that came along every now and again and told you to sit up and take notice. And on the day Lance would have turned eighteen, quite simply, Carmen had needed a shoulder to cry on. Never mind that this shoulder was three thousand miles away in the home of a complete stranger.

 _Your nephew was my son’s best friend,_ Akani had said. Just that was all it took to set Carmen off.

The week that followed had been hell in every sense of the word. There were still bills to be paid, still school to be endured, and everyone did their best to carry on, however much they all wanted to cry.

Carmen still had a shirt wadded up in a plastic bag in her closet, Val having thrown it there while shouting that, “Lance digs through my apartment all the _time_ , Mamá, I can’t hide his present there!” Carmen honestly thought Lance would have just assumed the shirt—a black tank top with a cartoon alien colored pink, purple, and blue and the word _bisexualien_ stamped underneath—was Val’s.

But Val had insisted, and so it hand ended up in Carmen’s closet next to the laser pointer Lance had wanted for stargazing and the download code for Lance’s favorite band’s new album and the new skeins of yarn for Lance’s next knitting project.

She couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it, so there it sat, collecting dust, waiting for a party that was never going to happen.

News that Akani and her wife were coming to Carlsbad had been a shock—but not an unwelcome one. And when they’d showed up on Carmen’s doorstep and invited her to dinner with Mrs. Holt and her little crew, the ones who had taken Val—

Carmen had simply been too tired to fight it any longer.

It had been four days since then, and Carmen had done her very best to focus on work, and on making dinner, and on teasing Sebastian out of the silent shell he’d pulled around himself after they lost Val.

She was over at her in-laws’ for dinner when Akani called with her second invitation.

“Feel free to say no,” Akani said as soon as Carmen picked up the phone, and if that wasn’t a bad omen, Carmen didn’t know what was.

“Say no to what?”

Akani huffed out a short breath. “Eli—Lana’s brother, you met him on Saturday? He’s going out of town. And, well, that means there’s room at the table.”

“I’m sorry.” Carmen shook her head, glancing over her shoulder to where Mateo sat watching TV. “Mateo, turn that down!” He rolled his eyes, but did as she said. (That was something, she supposed. Lance’s siblings were healing faster than the rest of them—though Rosario had confided that it was mostly because Val had told them Lance was still alive. They hadn’t yet let go of that hope.)

Carmen turned her attention back to Akani.

“What is it you are trying to ask me?”

“Dinner,” Akani said. “Thing is, I’m used to cooking for the dinner rush, and now it’s just me and Lana and two others, and I was wondering if your family wanted to come over.” Her voice so far had been bright, but it turned strained now. “You don’t have to. I know how… with Karen and all…”

Somehow Karen Holt’s name still had the power to drive a hot nail into Carmen’s chest. She’d met the woman now, knew Karen was only trying to bring down the man who had killed her family, had killed Lance and Val. Karen was mourning, the same as any of them.

She wasn’t a bad person.

Carmen still couldn’t bring herself to like the woman.

“It would be nice to hear a familiar voice,” Akani said softly, and Carmen’s resolve shattered.

“I can’t promise anything for the rest of them,” she said. “But… I’ll ask.”

* * *

In the end, it was just Carmen and Sebastian who went. Marco had a fundraiser for work that night, and Rosario stoutly refused to hear the request. Carmen couldn’t fault her for it, so she hadn’t pushed. But Sebastian had hardly left the house since coming home from college. His friends were all in California still, so there was nothing to distract him from thoughts of his sister except for Luz and Mateo. Rosario found any excuse to have him watch them—for which Carmen was grateful—but it wasn’t enough.

Her son had always been quiet, but this apathy had her worried. He hadn’t even argued when she told him he was coming along, only sighed, rolled off the couch, and dragged himself upstairs to run a wet comb through his shaggy hair and put on a less-stained shirt.

Akani greeted Carmen at the door with a hug, the scents of dinner drifting out around them.

“You came!” Akani’s voice held more relief than Carmen might have expected.

Mrs. Holt lingered in the living room with the Shirogane boy as long as she could, letting Akani and Lana monopolize the conversation with the Mendozas. Or with Carmen, at any rate. Sebastian headed straight for the table and dropped into a chair, crossing his arms on the placemat and fiddling with the silverware as the others talked.

“You said Eli’s out of town?” Carmen asked when they ran out of pleasantries.

Lana grimaced and knocked back half her bottle of beer in one gulp. Carmen’s beer was still mostly full, and the others had all stuck to water. Carmen was glad for it. This was one gathering where a buzz was more likely to sharpen an edge than take it off. They’d survived the first dinner with awkward silences and a quick exit, but Carmen knew that the Kahales’ buffer couldn’t last forever.

Akani glanced nervously at her wife, but summoned a smile for Carmen’s sake. “Protests,” she said shortly. “Just little things, but Eli thought if he could sell the footage to enough news stations, it might get more people interested in the story.”

 _Story._ Carmen’s hand tightened on her beer bottle in distaste. Was that all this was to these people, a _story_?

No. Val had been a journalist. She’d done just this—drum up interest in a story, play up the drama. It was all part of the media game, a flashy dance to catch the readers’ eye. But just because they played the game didn’t mean they didn’t genuinely care underneath it all.

Val had cared. So, too, did Eli.

“Protests?” Carmen asked when she trusted herself to speak. “What are there protests for _now_ of all times?”

“You… probably don’t want to know,” Akani said.

That, of course, only made Carmen more curious, but Lana and Akani remained tight-lipped.

“More people have gone missing.” Akira stood in the doorway, arms crossed over his chest, his eyes on the floor. He shot a guilty look at Akani, but went on speaking. Karen lingered just behind him, her wary gaze fixed on Carmen. “We’ve only just started hearing about it, but… Val wasn’t the only person looking into the accident who’s disappeared.”

A vice closed around Carmen’s chest. Behind her, Sebastian shifted, his breath rasping loud through his nose. “What?”

Akira closed his eyes, sighed, then crossed to the fridge and pulled out a beer of his own. He popped the cap off and took a swig before answering. “More and more people have been looking into what happened, especially since Val disappeared. Not just in Carlsbad, either. All over the place. Some of the most vocal activists online started disappearing, but people figured they’d just lost interest. Happens all the time, right?”

“Except three families came forward this week saying a loved one went missing after a visit to the Garrison,” Karen put in. She sent Carmen one more, timid look, then straightened up. “There are half a dozen more reports from around the globe—all of them in cities where the Garrison has a presence. Mostly people who were vocal critics of the Garrison, though the last two I saw didn’t seem to have a connection.”

“Coincidence?” Akira asked.

Karen shook her head. “Probably, but even without them—”

Akani held up her hands to put an end to the conversation. “I don’t think this is something we really need to be discussing right now,” she said, forcing a laugh. Anger flashed across Karen’s face, but it vanished when her eyes fell on Carmen, and she backed off at once.

Akira, in contrast, only scowled deeper. “Iverson’s already doing enough to bury this story,” he said. “I’m not going to help him.”

Tense silence fell over the group, but it was soon interrupted by a knock at the door. Akani turned at once to answer it, but the door was already opening, an unfamiliar voice calling out, “Did you hear what fucking Iverson’s doing this...time?”

The new arrival appeared in the kitchen doorway at that moment, her voice trailing off as she caught sight of Carmen and Sebastian. She froze, eyes going wide, short, reddish brown hair snapping at her chin.

“Oh.” She said. “Um.”

Akira sighed, scooting closer to Mrs. Holt. “Guys, this is Naomi. Naomi—” He paused, then waved around the room. “Everyone.”

Lana arched one eyebrow in his direction, but he just sipped his beer in silence while Naomi floundered in the doorway.

Akani finally took pity on her, holding out a hand for the woman to shake. “I’m Akani—Hunk’s mom—and this is my wife, Lana. You’re Akira’s friend, right? From the Garrison. He mentioned you.”

“Uh. Yeah.” Naomi’s eyes hovered on each of them for an instant, then flickered right back to Carmen and her son. “I take it that makes you two Lance’s family?”

Carmen nodded, but it was Sebastian who spoke, his voice low and scratchy and laced with confusion. “Do I know you?”

Akira tensed. It was almost imperceptible, except that Karen laid a hand on his arm, as though to hold him back. But why?

“That depends.” Naomi shoved her hands into her pockets and strolled into the kitchen, dropping heavily into the chair across from Sebastian. “You visit Lance at the Garrison often? I work there, so you might’ve seen me passing by?”

Sebastian frowned, but he didn’t offer an argument, just shook his head and went back to resting his chin on his arms. Carmen studied Naomi for a long moment, searching for a flash of familiarity. She found none.

The silence stretched just long enough to be uncomfortable, and then Akira sighed, dropping his arms to his side. “If you’re here to tell us about the other disappearances, we already know.”

“Then you know to be careful,” Naomi said, a warning in her voice. “If Iverson _is_ behind this, he might decide to get rid of the burrs in his side.” Her pointed look told Carmen those _burrs_ were the very people in this room.

“He wouldn’t _dare_ ,” Carmen hissed.

Naomi just looked back at her blandly. “Lady, you don’t know the half of it.”

* * *

Pidge was glad Lance had gone to find Allura, but at the same time they couldn’t help being a little bit bitter. It was impossible to sit still with the raw edge of Shiro’s kidnapping gnawing at them; a quick jog down to the Black Lion’s hangar might have helped expel some of their jitters.

But Lance had been faster, so Pidge had to content themself with pacing the perimeter of the bridge while the others looked on—Hunk slumped in his chair, legs jiggling with Pidge’s same restless energy while Shay rubbed his back, her eyes far-off; Coran and Ryner conversing quietly by the controls, tension making the lines around their eyes stand out more than ever; Matt and Keith perfect mirrors of each other in the corner, Keith drumming his claws on the hilt of his sword, Matt muttering to himself, or maybe to Keith.

The sound of the elevator door opening drew every eye, and Lance faltered at the sudden attention. Allura stood beside him, smooth-faced and straight-backed. She laid a hand on Lance’s shoulders, then met every gaze in turn as she strode toward the holographic projector.

“All right,” she said. “What do we know?”

It was as simple as that. The paladins all slipped into the briefing easily—they’d been waiting for this for a good ten minutes now—and Pidge took center-stage, as they’d spent the short trip back to the castle-ship reviewing what they’d been able to dig up on the Galra servers.

“Haggar is here.” Pidge tapped the screen projected from their gauntlet, sending the coordinates to the ship’s main computer. “Not much in the area except for other Galra ships. It’s pretty deep in Zarkon’s holdings—not far from the old Galra homeworld, actually.”

“There’s a Galra homeworld?” Lance asked.

Keith spun the hilt of his deactivated sword in his hand, the slap of its grip meeting his palm marking a steady rhythm. “I doubt Zarkon’s been there anytime in the last few thousand years. It’s basically all slums and wasteland at this point. The only people who live there are the descendents of people too poor to leave when the planet died.”

Hunk twisted in his chair to gape at Keith. “ _Died_?”

“That doesn’t matter right now,” Pidge snapped, and Keith nodded appreciatively at them. “The point is, Haggar’s withdrawn somewhere she feels safe. We can wormhole in, obviously, but I doubt anyone else would risk it. Once Haggar knows we’re there, we’ve got maybe five minutes before reinforcements show up. And lots of them.” They tapped their screen again, and the nav computer plotted the last known location of two dozen warships within shouting distance.

Ryner crossed her arms, frowning at the display. “This is a trap.”

No one bothered to argue. “I’m sure Haggar’s also pulled back in order to carry out whatever sick experiments she wants to do on Shiro,” Pidge said dryly, then hurried on when Matt turned green. “But, yeah, mostly it’s a trap. We still have Allura to pilot the Black Lion, so Zarkon needs to take out at least one more of us before he removes Voltron from the table.”

“Or take the Black Lion,” Allura murmured.

Pidge fidgeted at the reminder that Zarkon—Murder McScarface himself—had once been a paladin. But that didn’t matter now. “We’ll have to go in cloaked,” they said. There was no more argument over the fact that they were going to charge straight into the trap than there had been over the fact that it _was_ a trap. “One or two lions should be fine, since we’ll need to go after Shiro on foot.”

“Don’t want to get caught up in a space battle, anyway, right?” Hunk asked with a feeble laugh.

Lance, meanwhile, was pacing a broad semi-circle around behind Allura, Coran, and Ryner, his eyes riveted to the hologram. “Two lions,” he said. “That ship’s big enough to hold an army; we’ll want a distraction so some of us can sneak in the back.”

Matt glanced at Keith. “As long as we’re on the team that’s headed for Shiro, the rest of you can do whatever the hell you think is best.”

“Lance is right,” Allura said. Lance jolted a little at that, staring at Allura like she’d just said his hair was made of noodles. She ignored him and swiped a hand across the display. Three Lions appeared as her hand passed. “Lance, Pidge, Hunk, and Shay will go in first,” she said. The Green Lion flew toward the spot Pidge had marked on the map, and a model of Haggar’s command ship appeared there. “We won’t know Shiro’s exact location until we arrive, but you four will enter as close to him as possible.”

“As _close_ as possible?” Pidge asked, frowning. “Don’t we want to draw attention _away_ from the rescue?”

Lance crossed his arms, looking thoughtful. “If you show up on the other side of the ship, Haggar will know it’s a distraction, and the others will have a harder time sneaking in on the direct route.”

Allura nodded. “Precisely. Ryner, you will remain in the Green Lion. If all goes well, the rest of us will be able to get ourselves and Shiro out without raising an alarm, but the first team may need a quick exit.”

“Okay,” said Keith, “so they all go in using the Green Lion. Why are we taking _two_?”

“And why the Black Lion?” Shay added. “Did you not say Zarkon desires it above all else?”

Allura waved her hand again, and the Black Lion came to a stop some distance from the command ship before shimmering and disappearing. “I may have a way to fight Haggar’s control over Shiro, but I’ll need Black close if it’s going to work. But you’re right, Shay. I don’t think Zarkon will be here, but Haggar certainly will be. If she knows Black is near, she will try to take her. That’s why I’ll hide my lion some distance from the ship, then come in with Matt and Keith on Red. Ryner, you’ll also need to keep an eye on our lions. They’ll be vulnerable while we’re inside the ship, and Coran will have to keep the castle-ship on the other side of a wormhole. We’ll need you to tell us if the Galra make a move against Red or Black, or if reinforcements arrive.”

“Understood,” Ryner said.

“Is that it, then?” Matt asked. “Seems straight-forward enough.”

Coran nodded. “Simple plans are usually better. Fewer things that can go wrong.” He glanced at Lance as he spoke, and Lance just rolled his eyes.

“Hey, that strategy was a work of art! Or… Well, it would’ve been, if I’d managed to pull it off.”

Pidge arched an eyebrow, then decided they were better off not knowing what that was about.

Allura, apparently, felt much the same. She frowned at Lance, and then at Coran, then shook her head. “At any rate, yes. That’s the plan. One last thing: I don’t know where Haggar will be. She may come to stop you,” she said to Pidge, Hunk, and Shay. “Or she may be with Shiro when we find her.” She nodded at Matt and Keith. “In either case, we are _not_ here for her. When we face Haggar, we’ll do it on our terms, when we have a solid plan in place. If you see her, get away as quickly as you can.”

Around the room, heads nodded. Allura straightened, her hands balling into fists.

“Then let’s go.”

* * *

Five minutes later they were in position, and Pidge’s nerves were running too hot to be soothed by Ryner’s presence at the other end of the bond. Coran was several thousand light-years away, watching the sector for signs of movement; Allura, Matt, and Keith were somewhere out of sight, waiting for Lance’s signal; and through it all Ryner was as quiet and steady as a forest.

Pidge felt more like a turtle, plodding forward when all they really wanted to do was pull back into their shell and wait for disaster to strike.

Ryner sent a calming thought through the bond—hardly the first since the three lions had emerged from a wormhole in the shadow of a distant planet. Even moving swiftly, keeping the gate as small as possible, and arriving more than a light-day from their target (four times the distance from Earth to Kerberos), there was no way to erase all signs of a wormhole. They’d spent thirty tense seconds waiting for an attack, and when it hadn’t come, they’d breathed a sigh of relief moved in.

Well, everyone else had breathed a sigh of relief. Pidge was wound tight enough to snap, and even the smooth approach couldn’t ease their nerves.

They weren’t ready for this, none of them. Lance was still exhausted from his last brush with Haggar, Hunk was on the verge of a panic attack, Shay had barely spoken since Shiro was taken—and that wasn’t even thinking about Keith and Matt. Pidge was still halfway surprised the Red Lion hadn’t dropped all pretense and started blasting Haggar’s ship out of pure pent-up rage.

And Pidge. Pidge was the worst of them all, possibly because they knew _exactly_ how unprepared for this they all were. Matt and Keith were going to get Shiro, but neither one of them had been able to move a muscle when Shiro attacked Allura. Pidge hoped it would be better this time, but what if Allura’s trick with the paladin bond didn’t work? If they had to fight Shiro to get him back, would either of them be able to do it?

Pidge wished desperately that they’d had the time to find a master switch in the code of Shiro’s arm, something that would shut it off entirely. They might have pushed for just a little more patience if they’d thought they could have made progress in an hour or two.

It was probably for the best that they hadn’t bothered. In all likelihood they’d have surfaced from the code to find the Red Lion gone and two more paladins in Haggar’s hands.

“Anyone else starting to think we should’ve just formed Voltron and smashed through whatever reinforcements Haggar tried to call?” Pidge asked. They spoke out of pure nervousness—they knew exactly why destroying a ship that held Shiro was a bad idea—so it was just as well no one paid them any mind.

Anyone but Lance, who squeezed their shoulder and offered a thin smile. “You guys running into any trouble on your end?” he asked.

“All clear,” said Allura. “I’m almost in position.”

“Perfect.” Ryner gave Pidge a mental nudge, and her seat, which normally sat to one side of Pidge’s, in front of the modded weapons controls, slid toward the center of the cockpit so Ryner could take over as pilot. “Heading in now.”

Lance muttered something under his breath, then flushed when Pidge raised an eyebrow at him as they turned their attention to the comms system. Rover was plugged in, and Pidge used Green’s transmitter to send an access code to a hangar door near Shiro’s location.

“It’s nothing,” Lance said quickly. “I’ve just got a bad feeling about this.”

“Why?” Hunk asked. “Nothing’s gone wrong. Yet,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

Lance grimaced. “That’s the problem. It’s too easy.”

“We came in quiet and we’re cloaked,” Keith said testily. “Easy is _exactly_ what we wanted.”

Humming, Lance let the matter drop, but his fingers kept drumming against his leg, a rapid _ta-ta-ta-tap_ not far from Pidge’s ear.

There was no time to worry about whether things were going too smoothly or just according to plan. The hangar doors opened, and Ryner took them in. Lance and Pidge led the charge, Hunk and Shay close behind, Ryner’s call of _good luck_ echoing over the comms.

They barely made it out of the lion before they met resistance.

* * *

Keith started the countdown as soon as Ryner gave the signal—or maybe it was Matt who started it. Keith wasn’t sure it really mattered. They needed to give the others thirty seconds to draw the guards’ attention before going in themselves.

Thirty seconds hadn’t seemed like such a long time when they were outlining the plan back on the castle-ship, but now, with the bond a fire in Keith’s blood, every second seemed a small eternity.

“You’re sure it’s him?” Matt asked. It was just the latest variation on a theme that had carried them here from the wormhole, a thousand repetitions of _can you feel him?_ and _is he hurting?_ and _everyone remembers the plan, right?_

Allura, to her credit, remained as patient as ever. “We’re positive. The Black Lion knows her own.”

Keith tried to take comfort in that. Shiro was here. Shiro was alive. Haggar was almost certainly still controlling him, but he was _here_. Allura had refused to elaborate on Shiro’s condition beyond, “It feels… odd,” and the uncertainty in her tone resonated in Keith’s head, and in Matt’s head, and in the raging inferno between them.

There was a part of Keith that remained rational, and this corner of his mind was aware that he and Matt were feeding off each other, an escalating loop of anxiety and the urge to act. It danced in their bones, made hands fly across controls to check and double-check every scanner. If Allura hadn’t at that moment eased the Black Lion into position and called for Matt and Keith to pick her up, Keith couldn’t honestly say he wouldn’t have just taken them in. Ten seconds couldn’t really make that much of a difference, could it?

Instead they eased Red toward the Black Lion—visible only on their radar, as both their cloaks were already engaged. Keith watched Allura’s signal separate from her lion’s. A moment later she appeared, flickering into being among the stars, the black sections of her armor fading into the void.

Red scooped her up in her mouth a second later, and with the silent countdown drifting into the last few seconds, Keith and Matt turned and headed for Haggar’s ship.

Allura joined them in the cockpit as they neared the hull, skimming close as they watched the BLIP-tech readout for an uninhabited part of the ship to serve as their point of entry. Keith’s trigger fingers itched to simply tear Haggar and her troops apart, but he resisted the temptation. They had to stick to the plan. They had to go in quiet.

Keith would do that, would tamp down his anger and hope he never got the chance to beat up even one enemy soldier, however much he wanted a target for his rage. He would gladly internalize this frustration if it meant getting Shiro out safely.

“There,” said Allura, arm outstretched beside Keith’s head (no, Matt’s head) toward the BLIP-tech display. Both red paladins saw where she was pointing: a small maintenance hatch on the hull. The scans were barren for a good distance in all directions. No guards, no mechanics.

Red was already changing course toward the hatch. She flared her boosters to slow her approach, and almost before she stopped, Matt and Keith were on their feet, leading Allura out into the vacuum of space.

Keith kicked off the bottom of the ramp and sailed, head-first, toward the hatch, activating his sword as he went. The tip sank easily into the metal, the resistance just enough to slow him before he cracked his helmet open. Matt arrived an instant later, grabbing onto Keith’s shoulder to steady himself and bracing his feet against the hull.

The magnetic anchors in their boots activated with a thought, and Matt turned to catch Allura as Keith quickly cut through the hatch and into the ship beyond. Air began to leak out as he worked, and when, with one final twist of his sword, he pried loose the square he’d cut out, a gust of wind buffeted him.

It passed in an instant, and silence reigned once more. Keith leaned forward, staring down past his feet into the hole he’d made. A narrow corridor stretched down into the depths of the ship below him, bare metal catwalk surrounded on all sides by pipes and power cells. The space was dimly lit, but it was also abandoned, at least as far as the airlock waiting twenty feet below.

Disengaging his mag-boots, Keith grasped the edges of his make-shift door and propelled himself into the ship.

As soon as he passed the hull, artificial gravity caught him, and what had been _down_ became _forward_. Keith landed in a crouch, gave himself a moment to reorient, then headed for the airlock controls while Matt and Allura joined him.

It was inside the airlock, waiting for the ship to equalize pressure, that the reality of the situation came crashing down on Keith.

Shiro was here.

Shiro, but not Shiro. Haggar was pulling his strings, and she hadn’t hesitated for an instant to use Shiro to attack Allura. The same would be true this time, as well.

Shiro was here, and Keith was going to have to fight him.

 _Distract him,_ Keith corrected, silently, as the airlock released them into the slightly brighter but no less empty corridor beyond. _I just have to distract him until Allura and Black can do their thing._ _It’ll be just like sparring._

* * *

Lance led the charge to punch through the first line of Galra defenders. Pidge and Hunk came in close behind him, bayards spraying neon-bright light through the gloom of Haggar's ship. They'd punched through into a hangar initially, but the clawing vacuum of space had soon forced the fight out into the corridor, where there was no danger of suffocating—or being pulled out into the void.

Still the Galra were pressing in on all sides, almost too many of them to count, guns popping with bright light, swords flashing. Lance was already beginning to regret not bringing along any of their front-line fighters. Normally, they counted on Keith, Matt, Allura, and Shiro to get in among the enemy and hold them off so the ranged fighters could breathe a little bit. Now they only had Pidge to serve as a buffer, and as terrifying as Pidge was, they were no tank.

Their bayard zipped out, impossibly bright in the subdued purple hues of the corridor, and lashed around a Galra soldier sighting on Hunk. With a cry, Pidge yanked hard on their bayard and flung the man to the side, using him as a living bludgeon to take out a good number of his friends. Hunk hollered a thanks, then turned his own gun on the crowd, mowing down a dozen sentries in one merciless barrage. Lance kept quiet, his nerves still running on overdrive as he picked enemies off one by one.

Something was definitely not right about all this.

He still hadn't been able to put his finger on what, exactly, it was that was bothering him. Not that it was too easy, not anymore. They had to have taken down at least forty guards already, and they hadn't even been here five minutes. Sure, those had almost all been sentries, and sentries were both crap soldiers and expendable as all hell. But still.

Maybe that in itself was the problem. The response from the ship's crew had been quick, but not suspiciously so. They'd been on alert, probably. Haggar would have had to expect a rescue mission of one kind or another, even if she couldn't know exactly when or where it would happen. But a Voltron Lion crashing through your hangar doors wasn't exactly something you could overlook. Lance and the others had barely made it out of Green before they were neck-deep in Galra.

Ryner had pulled out sometime after they gained the corridor; Lance had heard her talking over the comms, though the words were slow to penetrate. Something about how Allura, Keith, and Matt were on the move. Lance hoped they moved fast.

No, so far everything had gone according to plan. Bust onto Haggar's ship, draw the attention of every Galra in the vicinity (hopefully), make a good show of trying to break through, as if they really were here for Shiro. The corridor they were in was barely wide enough to fit three of them shoulder-to-shoulder, so Shay lingered in the back. She had her shield out, but she held no weapon. There had been some question of whether she should be the one to stay outside in her Lion, so Ryner could come in and provide extra firepower, but ultimately the team had decided against that. Shay was the only one of them who knew any real field medicine, and on a mission like this—storming a fully-armed command ship, with _Haggar_ on board—made injury more than a fleeting possibility.

They pressed forward, lasers flashing all around. A soldier opened fire on Pidge, and Lance yanked them behind him, raising his shield to catch the barrage. Hunk gunned down their attacker, and Pidge took advantage of the moment of chaos that followed to dart out, close the distance to the army, and cut down three more Galra.

The line broke before their onslaught, Galra and sentry alike beating a hasty retreat as the paladins continued to shoot them from behind. Lance felt an itch between his shoulder blades like he was being watched, but when he spun to find the source of the sensation, all he saw was empty corridor painted in cool tones, dead bodies and sparking robots marking their progress.

"Hey, Ryner?" Lance asked, shaking himself and turning to follow the others onward. "How's it looking?"

"Fine," said Ryner. "There are still a few guards near where Shiro is being held, but most of them are converging on your location."

Lance couldn't help but frown. _Wrong, wrong, wrong,_ screamed something in his veins. "And... no sign of anyone going for the Black Lion?"

"It's _fine_ , Lance," Keith growled. "Just focus on your job."

Lance bristled, but he was wound too tight, even, for a retort. Something was _wrong_. It taunted him, a shadow lurking at the edge of his vision. If he could only figure out why everything about this ship was screaming at him to turn around and run the other way.

The corridor spilled out into a larger room. A storage area, or a cargo hold of some kind. Boxes were piled up around the edges of the room, colorless tarps thrown over them, and the Galra had taken shelter behind the stacks. Crystals glowed around the edges of the ceiling, casting the room in faint shadows. Aside from the corridor they'd come through, there was only one other exit, a pair of doors on the far wall.

Lance didn't have time to worry any longer about his bad feeling. There, in the center of the room, was a very familiar druid.

"Looks like we found Haggar," Lance muttered, pitching his voice low so the witch wouldn't hear him. There was silence on the comms for the space of two heartbeats, and then Allura blew out a long breath.

"Good," she said. "That means the path to Shiro is that much clearer. Stall her for as long as you can, but be ready to run the instant anything changes, all right?"

Lance nodded to himself, then raised his rifle toward Haggar. His hands were shaking, his breath quick and shallow, and he hardly noticed when his rifle glowed blue and reformed as his grenade launcher. “Where’s Shiro?” he asked. He would have liked for his voice to be low and threatening, the kind of thing that would tell Haggar he meant business, but it trembled rebelliously.

Haggar smiled, her sharp teeth flashing white. “Are you hoping to join him, little lion? I would have thought you’d had enough of my magic after today.”

His muscles tensed in remembered pain, but he gritted his teeth. Blood hummed in his ears. “Give him _back_!”

His voice cracked on the last word, a dangerous, out-of-control sound. Lance could feel Hunk and Shay staring at him. Pidge, on Lance’s other side, had their eyes trained on the shadows around the room where the soldiers lay in wait.

Why had none of them attacked?

Lance shook himself, glaring at Haggar. He needed to get control of himself. He couldn’t show his fear, never mind that Haggar had almost killed him just a few hours ago, never mind that she was one of the most powerful people he’d ever met _and_ she had enough backup to take out all the paladins together. “I gotta say I’m surprised,” he said, pumping his voice full of every self-aggrandizing lie he’d ever told. “All this power, all these soldiers, and you’re still too much of a coward to face us without a handicap.”

Haggar’s smile faltered for just an instant, her lip pulling back in a snarl. “Impudent little _brat_. It’s a wonder someone like you ever became a paladin.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Lance said. His eyes were moving now, flickering toward every tiny movement around the room. “Maybe if you’d captured the Blue Lion instead of Red you’d have realized—she’d annoy you _way_ more than I ever could.”

Haggar snorted. “Given her taste in paladins…” she muttered, but didn’t finish the thought. Her smile was back, as chilling as ever, and Lance felt his false confidence waver. “I’m afraid your journey ends here, paladins.”

With a roar, she thrust her hands forward, and the scent of storms filled the air.

* * *

Allura kept her mind open as she moved, casting herself outward toward Shiro’s presence—still distant, but growing ever closer. The Black Lion rumbled inside her, an even sharper presence than Shiro’s; where Shiro was hazy, his mind unfocused and whisper-soft, Black was a shout, a beacon on the horizon so bright Allura didn’t even have to strain to see it.

She’d never maintained the bond over such a distance, but her mind and Black’s were bent toward the same goal. Shiro needed them. They needed _each_ _other_ if they were to bring him back. So although the bond quivered with the strain of holding it like this, Allura knew it would not fail. She wouldn’t let it, and neither would Black—mostly Black, Allura had to admit. It was the lion’s Quintessence flooding Allura’s mind, the lion questing ever outward toward Shiro. Allura’s spirit was strong, but not this strong.

“How much farther?” Keith whispered, pausing at a corner to peer around. They had proceeded quickly thus far, avoiding the few patrols who hadn’t gone to face the other paladins by the entrance Green had made.

It wasn’t fast enough, though. Allura felt the drumbeat in her chest telling her to hurry, and if she felt it, she knew Matt and Keith must be holding themselves back only by a very great effort.

Allura considered Shiro’s presence before she answered. It was difficult to pin him down; his mind seemed to be sliding away from her touch, fanning out over a broad area. It crept into the bond and slid toward Allura, toward Black—but it was not Shiro himself. Not his consciousness. She wasn’t certain he _was_ conscious in any real sense.

“We’re close,” she said, wishing she could be more precise. Feeling Shiro like this made her queasy, like it was her own mind breaking apart under the weight of Haggar’s compulsion. Her skin crawled at the thought, and she grit her teeth.

It was a shame Haggar had gone to face the others; Allura would have very much liked to tear her apart.

Keith gestured to let them know the next hallway was clear, and they took off at a dash, keeping low to the ground, swords and staff ready in their hands. They hadn’t yet had to fight their way through, and Allura hoped to keep it that way at least until Shiro was safe and whole once more, but all three were ready for any surprise Haggar thew at them.

They passed a door, so unremarkable Allura wouldn’t have spared it a thought if something within hadn’t grabbed hold of her heart and tugged.

She stopped, breathless.

“Shiro.”

Her voice was soft, but it might as well have been a shout. Matt and Keith staggered, already spinning toward her, identical looks of fearful hope on their faces. Allura opened her mouth to reassure them, but she couldn’t find the words.

 _**He is close,** _ whispered the Black Lion’s voice in her mind. _**Help him.** _

Allura didn’t need to be told twice. Spinning on her toes, she raced back to the door they’d passed, through which she’d felt that tug. She dropped her shoulder as she approached and turned her head away, shifting into a Galra form. The metal buckled beneath her strength, and she staggered through into the room beyond, already raising her staff to meet the guards she was sure were waiting for her beyond the door.

She’d been expecting a prison cell, or maybe a lab of some kind. But the room she found herself in wasn’t empty or cold. It wasn’t stone floors or metal walls, wasn’t putrid filth or the sterile scent of a lab.

It was a bedroom.

The door Allura had knocked off its track had fallen into a small closet that held black uniforms and silver armor. A desk had been built into the wall, a simple stool tucked into the space underneath. To the right, there was a bed that might have been plucked out of Shiro’s room on the castle-ship. It was a small bunk with plain, thin blankets that were neither threadbare nor luxurious.

Shiro lay there atop the sheets, arms folded beneath his head, eyes closed as though he’d fallen asleep. His head turned slightly toward the door as Matt and Keith stumbled in behind Allura though, one corner of his mouth pulling upward in a shadow of a smile.

“Was that really necessary?” he asked, and _by the ancients_ , it sounded just like the Shiro she knew.

Matt’s breath hitched, and Allura ached to cross the room toward him, but she didn’t need Keith’s outstretched arm to hold her back. The Black Lion was roaring in her head in fear and hatred. _That’s not Shiro._

Shiro breathed out, a short, almost sad sound. “You’re going to make this hard, aren’t you?” Not waiting for an answer, he rolled off the bed, uncurling like a lion ready for a fight, and opened his eyes. They burned yellow, as they had before, and the sensation of _wrongness_ rolling off of him redoubled. “Good. I was starting to get bored.”

Then he was moving, faster and more fluidly than any human should have been able to move. Allura raised her staff to meet him, but Keith was faster, sliding in between Shiro and Allura. His sword shrieked as it met Shiro’s glowing hand, the force of the collision driving Keith back several inches.

Matt grasped Allura’s arm as he hurried to help Keith, locking eyes with her for the barest instant.

“We’ll keep him busy,” he whispered. “Just hurry.”

Allura nodded, though Matt was already moving on and probably couldn’t see her. She fell back, reaching out for the Black Lion, and gathering her Quintessence in preparation for a different kind of fight.

She hoped this worked.

* * *

Lightning flashed past Lance's head, and he yelped as he ducked for cover.

"Lance!" Hunk shouted. Lasers flashed somewhere just out of Lance's line of sight.

Things were going... okay, all things considered. The Galra waiting around the edges of the room were actually proving to be less of a problem than Lance had imagined they would be, which was somewhat disconcerting. Oh, sure, it was all well and good that none of them were attacking, but _why?_ Why just stand there and watch, when the three paladins were so busy dodging Haggar's attacks that they would have been easy prey for any not-Haggar person in the room?

All Lance could figure was that Haggar had ordered her soldiers not to attack for some reason. Who knew. Maybe her druidic magic required blood sacrifice, and Haggar had promised to take the blood of anyone who killed the paladins before she managed to.

Whatever the case, they still stayed there, watching from the shadows, guns lifted in something that wasn't quite a threat, and Haggar kept blasting away with that lightning of hers—the normal yellow this time, not Quintessence-draining purple.

It seemed to Lance that that should have told him something, but he couldn't figure out what.

"I'm fine, Hunk," Lance said. He found his balance, raised his rifle, and aimed carefully at Haggar, who had turned her attention now to Pidge. Lance fired, and Haggar disappeared at the same instant, reappearing directly behind Hunk.

Pidge spun, slashing forward with their bayard. "I don't think so!" The bladed tip shot out across the open space toward Haggar even as Hunk danced aside, swinging his own bayard around.

But Haggar just teleported again, chuckling softly like this whole thing was some kind of game.

Hell, to her it very well might have been. It had been five minutes since the paladins stumbled into this room. Five minutes since the door sealed shut behind them. The Galra gathered around the edges of the room never moved, except when one of the paladins strayed too close to one door or the other, and even then the Galra only fired a warning shot or two, letting up the instant the offending paladin drifted back into the center of the room, where Shay lingered, her eyes wide with fear, her shield active on her arm.

Not a single one of Lance's shots had hit its mark; Hunk barely even had a chance to take aim at Haggar before she whisked herself away. Shay had once come very near to punching Haggar when she teleported directly in front of Hunk and Shay panicked, but that was just about the most damage they’d done. And if laser guns couldn't hit Haggar, then Pidge's little grappling hook didn't stand a chance, lightning or no.

But Haggar hadn't landed a hit, either—though in her case, Lance doubted it had anything to do with a lack of skill. She was toying with them.

But _why?_ She had to have realized by now that three paladins were unaccounted for. Were there other Galra out there closing in on Shiro's position? Had Haggar set a trap to stop them on their retreat, after they were already tired from fighting Shiro? Or was she just that confident in her oh-so-special 'Weapon' and her ability to maintain her control, whatever Allura tried?

Lance fell back closer to Shay, trying to get his racing thoughts to fall in line. He could hear nothing of interest over the comms; reinforcements had begun to arrive a few minutes ago, but they hadn’t spotted the lions yet. They were just… waiting, and Ryner and Coran had begun to plan the exit strategy once the rest of the team made it out. Allura and them were even quieter; there had been nothing at all since they found Shiro. Grunts, shouts, the occasional cry of pain. Nothing to say how much longer it would be until Allura broke through Haggar's control. Nothing to say whether or not any guards had joined the fight.

It didn't make _sense._

Pidge slashed at Haggar, forcing her to teleport away, and Lance took aim at the wisp of black smoke that preceded her arrival near one dark corner of the room. She was still too fast for him, teleporting away again, but Lance just turned and shot at _that_ smoke, too. Maybe if he was lucky he'd annoy her into showing her hand.

"She _has_ to have something up her sleeve," he muttered, so low that only Shay seemed to hear. She turned toward him, brow furrowed, but Lance didn't bother to elaborate. How could he put it into words? Haggar had no reason to keep any of them alive, unless she was stalling for time (but for what?) She was strong enough and fast enough and ruthless enough that she should have run them into the ground by now.

Even if he hadn't had Keith and Shiro's stories of all the horrible things Haggar had done, Lance had faced her before. He knew exactly how vicious she was. Lance hadn't lasted ten seconds with her without having to run away—and sure, he had backup of his own now, but even so...

It was the smallest slip, a mistake so slight Lance doubted anyone else noticed. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time, sighting along the barrel of his rifle as Pidge snuck up behind Haggar, who was hemming Hunk in with lightning on both sides.

Pidge swung, and Haggar didn't even see it coming. She _couldn't_ have. And yet, somehow, she teleported away just as Pidge's blade made contact.

 _Just_ as Pidge's blade made contact.

If Lance had blinked, he might have assumed it was the same as any other time—Haggar's reflexes were just too damn fast for the paladins, or her magic gave her some kind of precognition, or something.

Except he _was_ watching, and he saw the instant Pidge's blade phased through Haggar's back. The robes around the wound rippled for just an instant, wavering like a mirage. Wavering like Haggar’s illusory clones did when they were struck.

Then the smoke came, and Haggar’s clone vanished, and when it reappeared there was no blood, no wound, no hole in her robes, nothing to say she'd been hit by a diamond-edged blade snapping with electricity.

All at once, Lance understood. It wasn’t Haggar here, but a clone. The paladins hadn’t landed a blow, and Haggar hadn’t landed a blow, and the soldiers around the room hadn’t bothered to stop in—because this wasn’t a battle.

It was a distraction.

And Lance had fallen for it.

Horror flooded Lance's veins, and he lowered his rifle, his lungs freezing in his chest. "Guys," he whispered. "Guys! It's a trap! Haggar's not here—she’s headed for you!"

* * *

Matt felt as though he was watching another man fight.

It was his body that moved, his lungs struggling for breath. He felt each of Shiro’s blows radiate pain up his arms and into his shoulders, aggravating the crystals growing near his joints. His weak leg throbbed in time with his footsteps, and he knew he would have collapsed if not for the brace he’d built into his armor.

Yet it all seemed to be happening to someone else.

Matt wasn’t fighting his boyfriend. That was ridiculous. Shiro wasn’t evil, and Matt… Matt wasn’t that strong. Surely this was a dream, or a hallucination. Maybe _all_ of it had been a hallucination. Maybe he was still locked up in the E-dep chamber back on Vel-17, and everything he thought had happened since was only real inside his head.

(He almost wished that was true, because then, at least, there was a chance that it wasn’t Shiro whose body was being used against his will.)

Keith roared as he charged back into the fight from where Shiro had thrown him. They’d somehow managed to keep the fight contained to the bedroom, though the bed was in splinters, the contents of the closet strewn across the floor. Shiro circled them both with a predatory grace, reminding Matt somehow of a wolf assessing a threat.

Yellow eyes turned toward the doorway where Allura knelt, eyes closed, lips moving silently. Keith had demanded updates for the first minute or two of battle, but once Allura snapped at him to stop distracting her, he gave up and focused only on keeping Shiro away.

That was something else surreal about the whole thing, Matt decided. Keith fighting Shiro in earnest. They trained together often enough, but this was different. This was feral desperation from Keith, who faltered every time his blade came close to striking flesh, and cold disinterest from Shiro, who batted his best friend away almost lazily.

And so, somehow, it always came back to this: Shiro and Matt facing off across a wrecked bedroom, an ugly sneer twisting Shiro’s face.

Until Keith charged in and Shiro caught his sword in his hand.

“Pathetic,” Shiro spat, and though Keith’s face remained paralyzed in a rictus of fury, his shoulders tried to crumple at the disgust in Shiro’s voice. “What are you even trying to prove, Keith? That you belong here? You’re _Galra_. You’re never going to belong with _them_.”

Keith visibly flinched at the words and faltered long enough for Shiro to kick his legs out from under him, pivot, and send him flying back toward the bed, where he landed in a tangle of sheets and broken wood.

“And you.” Shiro turned back to Matt, arms loose, stance relaxed. He stuck his left hand on his hip and gave Matt a perfunctory once-over before snorting. “I should have put you out of your misery a year ago.”

The words might have stung, had any of this felt real. But it wasn’t Shiro who spoke them, and it wasn’t Matt to whom he spoke.

Matt felt himself blink, curl his lip, and charge back in. It didn’t matter that Matt (not Matt) was weaker and slower and less practiced than Shiro in all forms of combat. It didn’t matter that Matt (not Matt) was not a warrior, was in fact barely average in the combat simulations Allura had them all run. It didn’t matter, because Matt ( _not. Matt._ ) could never have stood aside and let the man he loved be used like this.

Shiro stepped back as Matt charged, but it wasn’t a retreat. He was only stepping back so that he could catch Matt’s strike on his forearm, the sparks snapping at both their cheeks as they pressed close, straining for the advantage. Shiro was taller, stronger, but he wasn’t fighting as hard. He only held, and leaned in closer to Matt.

For an instant, his face changed. Gone were the hard lines and cruel smiles. The yellow of his eyes never dimmed, but as long as Matt didn’t look at them, he could make himself believe that it was _his_ Shiro smiling back at him over the white-hot boundary where sword met arm.

“I love you, Matt,” Shiro whispered. “I wish I didn’t have to kill you.”

The words stole the breath from Matt’s lungs and the rhythm from his heart. _I love you, Matt. I love you._ It was the first time Shiro had ever said the words—and it wasn’t even _him_ who said it.

Rage swept over him, turning his vision white around the edges, and he kicked out, putting space between Shiro and himself as he drew back his sword, ready to end the fight. (That wasn’t Shiro. It _wasn’t Shiro._ )

He screamed as he swung, and Shiro’s smile flashed cruel and cold once more.

Then he froze, hand halfway raised to block Matt’s attack, his face going blank as Matt’s sword collided with his breastplate.

Shiro staggered with the hit, armor cracking with a horrible nails-on-chalkboard shriek, and Matt stilled, watching in confusion as Shiro fell. He didn’t even try to catch himself.

A soft violet glow surrounded him, so dark it was almost black, a shadow that clung to his skin without obscuring Matt’s vision. Matt stared, blinking slowly as his rage faded, leaving his mind to try to work through what he was seeing.

Keith, struggling free from the bed, laughed in disbelief. “She did it,” he whispered. “She actually did it.”

Matt spun toward Allura. She still knelt in the doorway, eyes closed, hands resting palms-up on her thighs. The same black-violet glow surrounded her, pulsing very slightly as she breathed.

Hope pounded in Matt’s chest, hope he hadn’t dared cling to since he’d seen Shiro’s soulless eyes.

“Allura?” he asked. “Allura, did it work? Is he--?” Matt turned, searching Shiro for signs of a change. He lay on his back, arm still glowing faintly where it lay at his side, eyes closed, brow furrowed. He seemed almost to be dreaming.

Hardly able to breathe, Matt returned his attention to Allura. He needed her to confirm it, needed her to say the words. _He’s okay. We’ve got him back._

A shadow fell across Allura, yellow eyes glowing beneath a deep hood.

Matt’s mind short-circuited, and he hardly heard Lance’s voice in his ear. _It’s a trap! Haggar’s not here—she’s headed for you!_

No.

No, this wasn’t happening.

This _couldn’t_ be happening. They were here. They’d found Shiro. Allura had gotten _through to him_!

Behind Matt, Shiro laughed, only it was Haggar’s laugh, thin and dry and taunting. The light around Allura changed, threads of crimson spreading through it as Haggar stretched one hand over her head. Matt stood frozen, Shiro’s laugh like ice in his veins. He knew he should move, knew he had to stop this, but he didn’t know how.

Slowly, as if she was fighting the motion, Allura’s head tipped back, eyes opening until she was staring at the darkness growing in the palm of Haggar’s hand.

“Thank you so much for opening your mind to me, _Princess_ ,” Haggar said. “I never would have been able to take you otherwise.”

Allura breathed in, one ragged, pained breath, but it was enough to shatter the shock cementing Matt in place. He shouted something—nothing—everything—and sprinted forward with no thought in his mind but to get Allura away from Haggar.

Haggar only smiled, and Allura’s eyes began to glow.

By the time Matt reached her, it was too late. She stood with the same predatory grace as Shiro, taking up her staff in the same movement and smacking away Matt’s sword. It spun out of his grasp, reverting to its inactive from before vanishing in a flash of light, and Matt summoned it back to his hand as he retreated.

Allura followed, an ill-fitting smile pasted on her face. Her eyes were fully yellow now, glowing as bright as Haggar’s, and the aura that had surrounded her faded. Her _glaes_ seemed to bleed, their shape becoming more angular, their color darker, until the woman standing before him seemed a total stranger.

The next step brought Matt back-to-back with Keith, who stood facing Shiro. For an instant it was as though they sat in the Red Lion’s cockpit. Matt could almost imagine he was looking through Keith’s eyes as Shiro advanced, arm glowing white-violet and humming with power.

“Vrekt,” Keith hissed, and Matt agreed with every bone in his body.

* * *

Ryner hadn't always been a commander, but she'd never been a soldier. She’d already been an old woman when war came to Olkarion, and though she’d taught herself to fight, a gun was never her first choice. She watched. She planned. She set traps and built defenses and organized the younger Olkari to fight at her command.

Sitting by and waiting to see whether all the preparation had panned out had never gotten easier.

The Green Lion hummed beneath her hands, Quintessence eddying in anticipation of a fight, engines purring with pent-up energy. Her cloak still held—Ryner and Pidge had tinkered with it once, when they needed a break from their other projects, and had managed to coax a few more minutes from the assembly. Knowing that—knowing they were invisible to Galra instruments—didn’t make it any easier to sit quietly as an armada gathered around them.

“I know how you feel,” Ryner muttered, patting the console. The paladins all knew their lions were sentient, but she wondered sometimes whether they realized just what that meant.

Green was restless, and she worried for Pidge, and though she knew she was one of the most powerful creatures in the universe, she still sometimes wished she could adopt a smaller form so she could stand at her paladins’ side when they left her to fight.

And Ryner knew all too well that longing to be on the front lines. They were needed here, though, to watch and to wait, to rescue the paladins on Haggar’s ship should things go awry and to protect the silent lions waiting a quarter-rotation around the belly of the ship.

Ryner’s eyes went to the display screen out of habit, even as she reached out with her Quintessence and accessed Green’s senses directly. The lions were all linked somehow, in a manner Ryner hadn’t yet figured out. They were all aware of each other constantly, so Ryner knew instantly that Red and Black were still roughly where their paladins had left them, though Black had drifted somewhat to stay as close to Allura as possible.

The younger paladins’ voices drifted through the comms, and one part of Ryner’s mind followed them, cataloging relevant information for consideration and discarding the rest. Another portion of her mind scanned the region for signs of attack from the new arrivals. A third hailed Coran on a private channel and asked whether he’d seen anything on his scans.

“Nothing,” said Coran. “They’re all still just… waiting.”

Before Ryner could relax at the report, Lance’s voice shot through her concentration, high and strained.

A trap.

Haggar had played them all.

At almost the same moment, Green bucked, roaring as something foreign shot through the Black Lion. She shuddered, a roar filtering through her connection to Green and on into Ryner’s mind.

A machine should never have sounded so frightened.

Ryner and Green turned toward the Black Lion, contingency plans tumbling through her head just below the surface. There were no Galra fighters in the air around the lions, no sign of activity on the ship itself except for a pair of bay doors sliding open.

Ryner shot forward, ready to haul the Black Lion out of danger, but Black was quicker. She rounded on Green, red wing-like thrusters flaring as her cloak fell away. Then, tail lashing, she spat a laser.

There was no time to doge. Green was nearly atop Black by this point, and Ryner was too slow to pull her aside. The laser shattered her shield, momentarily shorted out the generator holding the cloak.

It recovered a moment later as Ryner and Green both turned their minds toward the damage, but the armada had spotted her. Lasers filled the air around her, and Ryner had no choice but to flee as the Black Lion disappeared into Haggar’s ship.

* * *

This was a dream.

It had to be.

There was no way in any universe Matt could have actually come to this point, alone in a fight for his life against two of his closest friends and Zarkon’s second-in-command with only Keith at his side for aid. Somewhere, distantly, Lance and Pidge were shouting—promising they were on their way, demanding to know what was happening with Matt and Keith.

Matt couldn’t answer. Couldn’t form a coherent thought. (Shiro _and_ Allura. It wasn’t possible.)

As for Keith, he seemed more eager to fight than to talk, his motions edged now in terror, too quick for precision and too reckless for any sort of defense.

Haggar stayed only a moment, and then a lion’s roar echoed through the ship. With a smile that chilled Matt through, she vanished in a puff of smoke. She left Allura behind, though Allura seemed content to stay by the door and prevent them from leaving. Matt circled around behind Shiro while Keith held his attention, waiting until he had both Shiro and Allura in his line of sight before he ventured an attack of his own.

But Shiro wasn’t playing around any longer—Matt’s stomach dropped into his feet at the realization that everything up to this point _had_ been a game. He moved now as Matt imagined the Champion had moved: too fast to see, fluid and dangerous and ceaseless, and even Matt and Keith together couldn’t keep up with him. Their only hope was for Lance and the others to get here soon and stop the fight before--

Shiro leaped back to avoid Keith’s latest charge, pivoted on the ball of his foot, and grabbed Keith’s sword hand with his left. His right pulled back, its light going dark.

In the next heartbeat, the arm began to glow again, but it was no longer white-violet. Instead, the metal turned pitch black, blacker than a starless night, and crackled with all-too-familiar violet lightning. Shiro smiled as he thrust forward, his fingers punching holes in the smooth surface of Keith’s breastplate. Lightning snaked around Keith’s body, flashing so dark it seemed to sear Matt’s eyes.

Keith screamed, his back arching as the lightning continued for two interminable seconds.

“ _KEITH!_ ”

The shout echoed in Matt’s ears, and he recognized Lance’s voice. There was a commotion at the door, Allura shouting in a voice that hardly seemed her own.

But Shiro was turning, the black of his arm turning the same liquid gold that burned behind his eyes. Matt had time to take a single step backward, and then Shiro drove his fist into Matt’s gut.

Light flashed as agony consumed Matt’s world.

* * *

Lance swore, every profanity he knew in every language he’d ever heard tumbling out of him in a tangle of fear and grief that still wasn’t enough to stem the tide of emotions inside him. Keith wavered on his feet, black lightning still crackling around him, making his fur stand on end. Beyond him, Matt was wreathed in yellow, screaming a sound of pure animal torment.

“ _Matt!_ ” Pidge yelled.

Allura stood between Lance and the scene of carnage, but the fact that she hadn’t yet moved to interfere told Lance something had gone horribly wrong. Haggar. Haggar had been expecting them.

Lance didn't slow as he approached the doorway, simply dropped to his knees, skidding under Allura’s swinging staff. As he passed, Pidge’s bayard shot out, wrapping Allura in electric green. She screamed, and Pidge roared, and a sigh like a death rattle passed Keith’s lips as he collapsed. Lance barely caught him before he hit the floor.

Lance’s first thought was, _He’s already dead._ Keith’s lips were parted, his eyes half-lidded and utterly devoid of light, the yellow glow replaced with an opaque, brownish surface that glistened with tears.

Around Lance were shouts of pain and anger and frustration. Beside him was a corona of yellow. Matt had gone silent, but his breath was ragged and uneven, his feet kicking feebly as Shiro lifted him off the ground. Whatever sliver of Lance’s mind was still able to see the battle as a whole and not just these small, horrific bits of it, saw a bleak field. Pidge and Hunk still fought Allura by the door, and though Pidge was screaming for their brother, they weren’t going to be fast enough to stop Shiro before he killed Matt.

Keith shivered in Lance’s lap, clutching once at Lance’s arm before his grip went slack. Inside, Lance screamed, but outside was the calm of shock. His body felt cold as ice as he summoned his bayard and brought it around, no thought in his mind but that Matt would die if Shiro didn’t.

In the instant before Lance pulled the trigger, Shay charged past him, roaring defiance. She barreled into Shiro, knocking him to the ground as she snatched Matt away from him. The last traces of electricity flickered around her hands, glowing even more brightly than the blue light of Quintessence as she cupped Matt’s face in her palms.

As they slid to the ground, Lance caught sight of Matt’s face—his mouth open in a new scream, his eyes wide and blazing blue. Patches of crystal like scales spread across his skin.

It was only a glimpse, but the image burned itself into Lance’s eyes, and he looked on in horror as Shay bent over Matt, whispering frantically, “I am here, Matt. I am _here_. You will be fine. _Please..._ ”

“Shay!” Hunk cried. “Look out!”

She looked up as Shiro charged toward her, murder in his hollow eyes. Lance wasn’t sure if it was Shay he meant to kill, or Matt, but either way Shay was dead unless she moved.

She did move—but not away from Shiro. Face hardening, Shay planted herself in front of Matt, down on one knee, one arm still glowing blue as she cradled Matt against her side, one arm raised as if she meant to catch Shiro’s arm with her bare hand.

There was a flash of light somewhere behind Lance, and then the yellow bayard appeared in Shay’s hand. It glowed brilliantly for a split second, and when the light faded it had become a shield, six feet tall and nearly as wide. Its crystalline surface glittered like diamonds, and veins of blue ran through the metal beneath.

Shiro roared, bringing his fist down onto Shay’s shield.

For an instant, the ship held its breath. Then, through the silence, a horrible cracking sound.

The shield pulsed yellow, flinging Shiro backwards away from Shay and Matt. A dark, jagged crack ran up his cybernetic arm, the edges glowing furiously, the light in the rest of the arm faltering.

Shiro skidded to a stop, then dropped to his knees, breathing hard.

“What…?” Shiro whispered. “What am I…?”

At that moment, Matt let out a shuddering gasp, and Shiro’s head snapped up. His eyes— _grey eyes_ , ringed in white—locked onto Matt’s convulsing form.

“Matt?” Shiro looked around, from the shattered furniture behind him, to the fight at the door, which had fallen silent in the moment when Shiro’s arm cracked, to Keith—still and silent in Lance’s arms. All the while, Lance could only stare at Shiro, heart breaking as realization washed over his face. “Oh god. Oh, _god_. What did I do? What did I—?”

He broke off, howling as he collapsed in on himself, clutching his head between his hands.

Keith roused at the sound, his dull eyes fluttering open. “Shiro…?”

Before Lance could find his voice, dark smoke coalesced behind Shiro, and more at the edge of Lance’s vision, where Allura stood motionless. Two druids appeared, their faces hidden behind bone-white masks.

The druid behind Shiro grabbed him by the arms, and in the instant before they disappeared, Shiro looked up, tears streaming down his face, and met Lance’s eyes.

“You have to stop me,” he whispered. "Please."

And then he was gone.


	20. Wyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Everything went to hell. The paladins tried to rescue Shiro, who had been taken by Haggar, but she was ready for them. Now it's not just Shiro who's being used as Haggar's pawn; Allura was taken, along with the Black Lion, and Matt and Keith were gravely injured in the battle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *quietly redirects you all to the new installment in the _Voltron: Duality_ series, [_Finding Family_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10807746/chapters/23977413)* I wasn't kidding about writing some fluff to help with the angst of this arc. haha Six ficlets are up so far, with four more prompts waiting to be filled. I'm accepting requests for at least another week, maybe longer depending on how many I get. If you want to get in on the fun, leave your request as a comment on _Finding Family_ or as an ask on Tumblr ([@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com)). Anon is open!
> 
> Also, as of this chapter, _Someplace Like Home_ is the longest fic in the fandom on AO3. I'm... still not entirely sure how that happened.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: Mild body horror relating to Matt's crystals, and the threat of major character death during the first scene. (No one actually dies.) Mild body horror and implied torture during Val's scene. Police violence against protesters during Eli's scene. And generally high tension/anxiety throughout the chapter.

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #514  
>  Dated three and a half months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> As compensation for the loss of a test subject, Lady Haggar was granted full discretion over the future of the adolescent Altean prisoner, ID# 229-9876. He is scheduled to begin a long-term synthetic Q regimen along with the next batch of test subjects.
> 
> Zarkon has granted us provisional rights to Prisoner 117-9875, “Champion,” pending proof of concept.
> 
> His right arm was badly damaged in the Arena, so we have replaced it with a prosthetic of the new line, along with an experimental override chip. The prosthesis requires a higher concentration of synthetic Q to power its offensive abilities relative to older models It is believed that using such a prosthesis to deliver synthetic Q will result in the activation of latent technopathic abilities without the corresponding necrosis as the sQ additives induce the subject’s own Quintessence to mirror synthetic Q structure.

* * *

Lance staggered, breath coming short as he raced out of the Red Lion. Keith was limp in his arms, head lolling against Lance's shoulder with every step. Shay, carrying Matt, came behind, and Red roared in something near to panic. She must have sensed something wrong with her paladins, for she’d been raging outside Haggar’s command ship as the paladins made their escape. She'd blasted through the hull to grab the four of them, then tore through the reinforcements on her way back to the wormhole Coran opened up for them.

Red had brought them to the Black Lion’s hangar—closer to the pod room than Red’s own hangar, and conspicuously empty now that Black was…

 _No time to worry about that,_ Lance told himself. Keith and Matt were in bad shape. They needed the cryopods. As much as it hurt Lance to think, Shiro and Allura would just have to take care of themselves for now.

The Green Lion skidded into the hangar just as Lance and Shay reached the elevators, but they didn’t wait for Hunk, Pidge, and Ryner. Hell, if it was up to Lance, they wouldn’t have waited the three seconds it took for the door to slide shut.

Coran met them at the med bay, his face pale and drawn, his eyes tight with worry. “How are they?”

Someone—Pidge, Lance thought—had brought Coran up to speed during the retreat. Lance had barely heard it, but Coran obviously had some idea what to expect, because he gestured Shay toward a bed in the infirmary, where she lay Matt. A grunt of pain escaped him, reminding Lance that, yes, Matt was still awake, even if he hadn’t said a word since he collapsed under Shiro’s attack.

Shay’s hands hadn’t stopped glowing the length of the trip back to the castle-ship, and she moved them now toward Matt’s torso. Every line of her body spoke of exhaustion.

“He is in poor shape,” Shay said softly. “That lightning forced a great deal of Quintessence into his body, and it is causing the crystals to grow exponentially.” She broke off, grunting, and the patch of crystal visible on Matt's cheek swelled until it covered half his face. “I am trying to redirect that growth, to spare his vital organs, but— _vex_. It is too much. I—I _cannot_.”

Coran squeezed her shoulder, mouth open like he meant to offer some comfort, but he faltered, his eyes darting to Matt’s all-but-unrecognizable face. “Do what you can,” he said. “No one can ask more than that.”

She nodded, and Coran turned toward Lance. He’d stopped in the doorway, the cryopods calling out to him. Keith needed help. He needed-- “He’s not moving,” Lance said. His voice sounded small, but there wasn’t a scrap of bravado left in him now. Keith’s breathing had grown shallow, and his eyes, half-lidded, stared at nothing. If not for the tremors wracking his body, Lance might have assumed the worst.

Hurrying over, Coran swept Keith’s hair off his forehead and pressed a palm to the fine purple fur covering his skin. At once, his face fell, and Lance’s heart stopped beating.

“What? What is it?” Lance tightened his hold on Keith, searching Coran’s face for a clue to what he was thinking. “He’s going to be okay, right? Coran?”

The most telling thing was that Coran didn’t even attempt to put a happy spin on things. He just looked up at Lance, his eyes old and sad.

Lance barely heard the thunder of approaching footsteps, but then the others were there, gaunt-faced and breathless. Lance stared at them, wondering how he could possibly tell them that Keith…

“Matt?” Pidge asked, breaking away from the other two and inching toward Matt’s bed. They looked up at Shay, incongruously calm. Their voice was the same as it had been during the flight back to the castle: flat, hollow, lifeless. “Why isn’t he in a cryopod?”

“The pods run on Quintessence,” Coran said. “And more Quintessence is the _last_ thing your brother needs right now.”

“It is nearly over,” Shay said. “I… I know not how well he will come through this, but the crystal growth is slowing. He may...” She hesitated, staring down at Matt like she hadn’t seen him before. “He may yet survive. I know not.”

Pidge nodded, like Shay had said Matt needed a haircut, then turned and sat heavily on the floor beside the bed. Their eyes filled suddenly with tears, but then they folded their arms on their knees and hid their face.

“Okay, but what about Keith?” Lance demanded. “Quintessence won’t hurt him, will it? He should be in a cryopod. Why aren’t you helping him?”

“Lance.”

Coran’s voice was heavy, final. Like everyone else had already realized… Like Lance was the only one still in denial about…

“No,” Lance said. He stepped back, opening up more distance between him and Coran. “He’s _not dead_ , Coran. He’s—he’s just—he needs--”

“Lance,” Coran repeated. “He’s been drained of Quintessence. _Completely_ drained. No one can come back from that.”

Drained—just like Jost, the Galra spy they’d tried to rescue from the prison ship. Lance remembered the way Jost listed as they spoke to him, his eyes struggling to focus on his would-be rescuers. Shaking, Lance looked down at Keith. His eyes were dark and cold.

“He’s dying, Lance. They both are.”

Lance’s vision blurred. “You’re wrong. You’re _wrong!_ ” he repeated as Coran opened his mouth to respond. “He’s still alive. He’s—he’s—he’s _breathing_ , Coran. He’s _alive_. We have to help him! We have to _try._ ”

Pain washed over Coran’s face, but it was Ryner who stepped forward, giving Keith and Lance both an appraising look. She held a hand out into the narrow space between them, like she was feeling the heat coming off a stove, and her brow twitched downward.

Suddenly her eyes went wide, and she turned to Coran. “Prepare a pod.”

“But--”

Ryner ignored his protests, grabbing Lance by the shoulders and turning him so he looked her straight in the eye. “How long after the attack did you get to him?”

Lance blinked a few times, the question refusing to parse inside his tired mind. “How long… what?”

“After Shiro drained Keith’s Quintessence,” she repeated, patiently. “How long was it before you grabbed him?” Her gaze flickered over the top of Lance’s head. “The pod, Coran. Hurry.”

Thinking was difficult, but Lance forced himself to concentrate. The fight against Shiro and Allura hadn’t lasted long, and what little Lance remembered was something of a blur. A flash of black lightning. Keith’s strangled gasp. He staggered, and--

“I caught him as he fell. I was afraid he’d hit his head.” It sounded silly, when he said it like that, but it was the truth. He hadn't wanted Keith to get hurt any worse.

For some reason, Lance's answer seemed to reassure Ryner, who breathed out a minute sigh. “Thank Lubos,” she whispered.

“What difference does it make?” Hunk asked. “If he’s got no Quintessence...”

“Keith’s Quintessence is gone, yes,” Ryner said, pressing the back of her hand to Keith’s cheek. “Fortunately, he seems to be subsisting off Lance’s Quintessence, at least for the moment.”

Utter silence met this statement. In Lance’s case it was the silence of incomprehension. Subsisting off his Quintessence? What did that even _mean_? But Coran had whipped around toward Ryner so fast Lance heard his shoes squeak against the floor, and Shay had paused in her ministrations to gape at the trio clustered near the pod room door.

“But… that is impossible.”

Ryner shook her head, her antennae twitching slightly. “I have seen a great many impossibilities become reality since I joined you. What’s one more, really?”

Still no one spoke, though Pidge had lifted their head to peer over Matt’s bed and Hunk was glancing from Shay to Ryner to Coran like he expected one of them to speak at any moment. Then Matt breathed in sharply, a small, pained noise escaping him.

That seemed to break the spell hanging over them all. Shay went back to helping Matt, and Coran clapped his hands together. “All right. If we’re going to do this, we need to work fast. Hunk, Pidge, I’m going to need your help.”

Both hurried into the pod room, where Lance could faintly hear Coran barking instructions for the pair of them.

Ryner grabbed Lance’s face between her hands and looked him in the eyes. “This is dangerous for you, my child,” she said in a low voice. “There’s no way to be sure that Keith won’t absorb so much of your Quintessence that you end up in the same state as him.”

Lance shifted his grip on Keith. Galra were solidly built, and though Keith was scrawny he wasn’t exactly light. But Lance refused to set him down, even for a second. “I don’t care,” he said. “Look, I don’t get the whole Quintessence thing, but basically Keith’s safe as long as I’m holding him, right?”

“More or less.” Ryner’s eyes darted down, and her face tightened.

Nodding, Lance headed into the pod room, then carefully lowered himself to the ground, back against the wall, and settled Keith in his lap. “I’ll stay here, then. You just worry about helping Coran.”

Ryner nodded. “If you start to feel light-headed or drowsy at all—even very slightly—let someone know _immediately_.”

“Of course,” Lance said, though he knew he wouldn't. Coran and the others would work as fast as they could with or without a threat to Lance’s life. And anyway, there wasn’t a force in the universe that could pry Keith away from Lance right now.

He pulled Keith against him and rested his chin in the hollow behind Keith’s stupid, fluffy ears.

_You’d better not die on us, Mullet.  
_

* * *

Lance couldn’t have said how long it took to get Matt and Keith stabilized. Once Matt’s crystal growth slowed enough that Shay stopped worrying about a punctured lung or a crushed heart or a severed spinal cord, or whatever dozens of other concerns she’d had, she carried Matt to the pod Coran had modified for him. It, like the Altean boy’s, had one of Matt’s own crystals connected to the inner workings, which should help draw out some of the excess Quintessence Shiro’s attack had forced into him.

Shay wasn’t sure if the pod could draw Quintessence out of the crystals directly, or if it would drain Matt’s and force him to draw on the crystallized stores, but either way the result would be the same. Without Quintessence, Shay said, the crystals would recede—at least somewhat.

“I know not whether he will recover fully from this, but...”

“But it’s worth a shot,” Coran said, clapping Shay on the shoulder. She swayed a little, and Coran quickly shooed her off to the corner where Lance still sat with Keith. He glanced down as she approached, holding his breath until he was certain he’d seen the rise and fall of Keith’s chest.

_Still alive._

Shay looked exhausted, but she managed to stay awake while the others worked on Keith’s pod.

Compared to Matt’s pod, the modifications needed for Keith’s were quite extensive. Not that Lance could follow all the technical talk, tired as he was.

He shook himself, banishing the thought. He _wasn’t_ tired. Not running-low-on-Quintessence tired, anyway. It was just the usual post-battle exhaustion. He wasn’t shot full of adrenaline anymore, and his body was remembering just how hard he’d pushed it today. (Today? Or was it yesterday by now? Remembering how to check the time on his armor sounded like too much effort for such a trivial question.)

In any case, Lance got the gist of what the others were doing. Keith needed Quintessence. Given time, his body would restore itself to its usual level of Quintessence, but he used it up almost as fast as he absorbed it. Faster, maybe, if you took Lance out of the picture. They needed to find a more efficient way to replenish his stores.

“Like going into shock,” Lance muttered to Shay as she talked him through the problem. “Hyper--no, hypo? Hypo something. When you lose a lot of blood, whatever that's called. But with Quintessence. You’ve gotta give him a transfusion. But, like, a Quintessence transfusion. A Quintransfusion.”

Shay just blinked at him, which was fine. Lance figured he probably wasn’t making much sense even in human terms; couldn’t expect an alien to follow his (probably flawed) logic. At least she was talking to him, which was helping him stay awake, which meant Ryner wasn’t going to come take Keith away.

The problem of how to get the Quintessence into Keith stumped them all for a while (Quintransfusions not being standard medical procedure, apparently), but only until Ryner came up with the idea of using Matt’s Quintessence, instead of the ship’s. Seeing Lance’s confusion, Shay kindly explained that crystals contained a raw form of Quintessence that had to be processed before it could be used in organic systems. Total loss of Quintessence was dangerous primarily because of this delay. Even if you surrounded the patient with Balmera crystals, they would be facing organ failure by the time their body processed the Quintessence.

Twenty minutes, ten miles of Q conduit, half a dozen ex-Matt crystals, and no fewer than two stress-induced shouting matches later, Coran and the others had a channel drawing processed Quintessence from Matt’s pod to Keith’s and some kind of Quintessential solenoid...thing to guide the Quintessence into Keith’s body.

Shay had to help Lance stand, but together they got Keith into the pod. Lance lingered nearby, still holding Keith, until Coran confirmed that the system was working. Only then did Lance step back and let the glass panel seal shut.

Without a word of discussion, the others all headed for the door. Ryner paused to ask Coran if he was going to join their war council, but he declined.

“What we’re doing here—draining Matt’s Quintessence, replenishing Keith’s stores—it’s too new. I don’t trust it to go on unsupervised.”

So he was going to stay to watch over their recovery. Which was good. Lance was going to stay anyway, but, well, he didn’t know the first thing about how the cryopods worked, so he’d be less than useless in an emergency. (Somehow, that had never bothered him before.)

“They’re going to be fine,” Coran said.

Lance turned, suddenly realizing everyone else had gone. It was just Coran, holding himself up on the control console at the center of the room, and Lance, staring at Keith’s face. With his eyes closed so Lance couldn’t see his dull, waxy eyes, he didn’t look so bad.

Forcing a smile, Lance backed away from the pods. He glanced at Matt, then immediately wished he hadn’t. Shay had removed his outer armor, as she’d helped Lance remove Keith’s, but both were still dressed in their black undersuits rather than the usual off-white medsuits. Matt’s was torn in several places, jagged crystals jutting out. Thin layers of crystal, like iridescent scars, crawled up his neck and across his face. One of his eyes was crusted over entirely, little diamond drops clinging to his eyelashes. It might have been pretty if it wasn’t so horrifying.

“I won’t kick you out, if you want to stay,” Coran said, “but I do think the others could use you up on the bridge.”

Frowning, Lance turned toward him. “What for?”

Coran just shook his head, and so, with one last glance at his sleeping teammates, Lance headed for the elevator.

When he walked onto the bridge, though, he faltered. Pidge was curled up at their station, arms locked around their legs, rocking backwards and forwards, their eyes fixed at a point on the floor several feet away. Shay was hardly in better shape, though she was utterly still, tears dripping from her chin as she stared at her hands. They were flecked red with Matt’s blood.

Lance’s heart clenched at the realization, and he felt his stomach turn over. That would be just what he needed to put a cap on this god-awful day. Puking his guts out while half—God, _fully half_ his team was incapacitated one way or another.

Hunk and Ryner faced off beside the holoprojector, which still showed the model of Haggar’s command ship. Hunk leaned forward, shoulders curled inward, hands spread wide. Even before he spoke, Lance could see that a panic attack had him in its jaws.

“What are we supposed to _do_ , Ryner? We’re _five people_! Shiro and Allura are Haggar’s puppets now, Matt and Keith almost _died—_ Where the hell do we go from here? You want to try another suicide run? Because I don’t! What if it’s me next time? What if it’s Shay? What if—what if Haggar can force them to use the Black Lion’s telepathy thingy? What if that’s enough of a connection for her to take over all of us? _We can’t do this, Ryner!_ ”

Ryner raised her hands toward him, obviously trying to be the calming presence in the room. But she seemed frazzled, her antennae quivering, her face pinched. "It's going to be fine, Hunk. Just take a deep breath--"

"I'm breathing _fine_ ," Hunk snapped, though as a matter of fact, he was all but hyperventilating. "I need to know what we're supposed to do to _fix this._ "

Ryner caught sight of Lance at the door and sent him a frantic look.

For one surreal moment, Lance teetered on an edge. To one side lay fear, to the other, calm. He could panic, like Hunk was panicking—God knew he had more than enough reason to do so. Anxiety or no, Hunk was making a lot of good points. Haggar had taken out all of Team Voltron’s best fighters today, and two of them now fought under her control.

Lance shut down that part of himself, clinging to calm with all his strength.

“We _can_ ,” he said, stepping forward. Hunk turned toward him, eyes wide. “We can do this, because we have to. Matt and Keith are going to be fine; we just have to focus on getting Shiro and Allura back.” His voice, surprisingly, came out even, not a whisper of his inner turmoil showing through.

It sounded like a stranger talking.

“But...”

Lance dropped his hands onto Hunk’s shoulders, breathing in deeply and releasing it slowly. Hunk automatically followed suit, though his breaths kept trying to skip ahead. “We’re going to get them back,” Lance said between breaths. “We’re not going to let Haggar have them.”

Hunk’s breathing slowed to something approaching normal, and Lance stepped back, realizing Shay and Ryner were both staring at him, Shay’s face a mask of desperate hope, Ryner’s eyes keen, like she was analyzing his words.

Even Pidge’s head had turned toward him, just a little. They still stared at the floor, but it was obvious they were listening. “How?” they asked. “ _How_ are we going to get them back?”

Lance looked around, hoping someone would have a suggestion, because he sure as hell didn’t. They needed Allura here, or Shiro. Hell, Coran was a damn fine strategist, too, for all he usually let Allura run the planning sessions.

But there was no one here but the five of them, and it was beginning to dawn on Lance that the others were all waiting on _him_ to answer.

_Him._

Lance wanted to laugh at that. Wanted to cry. Shiro and Allura’s fates hanging in the balance, and the others wanted to put _Lance_ in charge?

He could feel his composure beginning to crack, but he dug in his heels and held out. He couldn’t panic. They couldn’t see him panic. Hunk was still balanced on the edge of an attack, Pidge and Shay not far behind. Ryner couldn’t hold them all together herself. If Lance lost it, then he might as well chuck their last hope for a successful rescue right out into space.

Squaring his shoulders, Lance forced himself to think. How to save Shiro and Allura? They needed to interrupt Haggar’s control, obviously, though Lance had no clue how to do that. Breaking into her command ship again was a bad idea, considering how poorly it had gone with three more paladins in the running. That meant drawing Haggar out with her new weapons. Or waiting for them to strike first--not ideal.

But those were all just targets; distant, shadowy targets he was trying to hit when he didn’t even have a gun in his hand.

He needed time to think. He needed time to come up with options, then weigh them out, see what actually made sense. At least in eshet, you had time to study the board before you had to make your first move. Looking around the room, though, he wondered how much time he had. Already his friends’ composure was wavering. Much longer and they’d be back to how he’d found them. They needed something. If not a plan, then a direction. Something they could do so they felt like they were making progress.

He could give them that much.

“Hacking Shiro’s arm is still our best bet,” he said, wondering if that was the truth or just a convenient lie. “If we can shut Haggar out, then the job’s more than half done. Pidge.” He looked at them, wondering for a moment whether this was putting too much pressure on them. But they sat up, legs uncurling. Their rocking hadn’t stopped, not totally, but their gaze was on their screen now instead of staring through the floor.

“Got it,” they said. “I’ll… I’ll see what I can do.”

“Perfect. Hunk, Ryner?” Lance turned toward them. “Haggar has the Black Lion now. I don’t like thinking about it, but there’s a chance we’re going to have to take it down. Think you can outfit our lions with something that’ll give us an advantage?”

Ryner glanced at Hunk, whose gaze had turned thoughtful. The panic was still there, lurking just out of reach, but he had a distraction now, and he would have Ryner there to talk him down. Hopefully. They nodded to Lance, and he turned toward Shay.

“Shay, your shield is the only thing we have so far that can stand up to Shiro’s arm.” Lance faltered as Shay’s head snapped up, her eyes wide with—fear? Stomach twisting, Lance hurried on. “I still say hacking is the way to go, but you cracked Shiro’s arm with that shield, and that weakened Haggar’s control somehow. If hacking doesn’t work, we’ll need a backup plan. You should try and get in some practice with the bayard—just so you’re comfortable with it.”

Shay’s eyes had grown wider as Lance went on, and he stopped now, wishing he could take back his words. She didn’t look like someone who’d been given a purpose. She looked like she’d been given a death sentence.

But Lance couldn’t make himself take it back. Shay’s shield _was_ the best weapon they had. She _should_ be ready to use it.

Still, Lance dropped his gaze and muttered, “Borrow Hunk if you need to. I’m sure he’d be happy to help.” He’d be happy to comfort her, if nothing else.

 _You wanted me to make a plan,_ Lance wanted to say. _Well, this is what you get._

“And you?” Ryner asked.

Lance tensed, clinging to the remains of his calm, collected disguise. “I’ll be up here,” he said. “Trying to figure out how to get Shiro and Allura away from the entire goddamn army.” This last had a note of desperation to it, so Lance straightened up, looking over his friends once, briefly. He tried to project confidence. “Any questions?”

Quiznak, what was he _doing_? He sounded like a cheap imitation of Shiro. He _was_ a cheap imitation of Shiro, spouting out all the right phrases, holding himself tall, arms crossed the way Shiro always did in a briefing. They way Shiro always had on TV before the Kerberos mission, when Lance watched with star-filled eyes and dreamed of growing up, becoming a pilot, going to space. Only then, he’d told himself, only after he’d made a name for himself, would he meet Takashi Shirogane, shake his hand, and say, “You were a real inspiration to me, sir.”

What a joke. Lance barely recognized the boy of his memories, who’d dreamed so big and somehow managed to believe it when people said he was born for greatness. His mother always said he was a born leader. Val made him promise to remember the little folks when he made it big. Tía Lena told him his destiny lay among the stars; all he had to do was chase it.

Lance wondered what they would say if they saw him now, pasting on an ill-fitting mask in a desperate attempt to hold this team together.

“Get some sleep, too,” Lance said, holding up a hand as Pidge whirled toward him, eyes flashing. “I _know_ , Pidge. 'It’s a waste of time.' But no. Going into this on no rest is just about the worst thing we can do. I’m not expecting any of us to sleep _well_ , but...” He ran a hand through his hair, his control unraveling at the edges. “Four hours. Promise me four hours, Pidge.”

Pidge snapped their mouth shut, then nodded grudgingly, and Lance breathed a sigh of relief. One by one, the others left. None was exactly enthusiastic about any of this, but they were focused. Lance figured that was about as much as anyone could ask of them.

Ryner lingered on the bridge after the other three had gone, her eyes steady on Lance’s face.

“What?” he asked, trying not to fidget. “Don't look at me like that. Someone had to--”

“Peace, Lance,” Ryner said, holding up a hand. “You did well. Better than I expected, to be honest, though it shames me to admit that.”

Lance’s brow furrowed, his tired mind trying to make sense of her words. He’d done _well_? Had she _been_ in the room for any of that train wreck? “I’m not Shiro,” he said.

Surprise, and maybe a touch of alarm, flickered across her face. “No one expects you to be.”

“I didn’t ask to be made leader.”

“You think anyone does? Any of the truly great leaders? You think _Shiro_ asked for this?”

Lance stopped, his chest growing tight. No. No, he knew Shiro had never asked to be put in charge of a war for the fate of the universe. It struck him as cruel, that someone who’d already spent a year as a prisoner never even got the chance to heal before he was shoved back into the furnace.

"Shiro saw a need, and he stepped up," Ryner said. "As you did just now."

Shoulders slumping, Lance turned his gaze to the viewscreen. “You’re the commander here, Ryner. You should be the one giving orders.”

“Lance.” Ryner stepped closer, resting a hand on his shoulder. She hesitated, and her next words came slowly. "You all seem so young to me. I want to protect you, even though I know I cannot. I see your youth rather than your skill." She shook her head. "I believe you are far better suited to lead this particular team than I am, Lance, but I will not force this burden on you. I won't." She paused, waiting for him to look up. He did, though he could hardly bear to meet her eyes, intense as her gaze was. She seemed to see something in him that just wasn’t there.

 _I’m just me,_ he wanted to say. _I’m no one special._

But when he opened his mouth to say yes, please, take over for me, I’m tapping out…

He hesitated.

Ryner smiled. “We are not a military here, Lance, as we were not a military on Olkarion. There is no command structure to give you a rank to lean on. My authority—and yours, now—doesn’t come from a title. It comes from trust. That’s one advantage you have over me. I’m still new to this team. I don’t know them half as well as I should like, and they don’t know me. They _do_ know you, Lance. They trust you. _That_ is why they look to you.”

 _Trust._ Lance wondered if Ryner understood the significance of that word. Trust. Unity. The traits the Blue Lion looked for in her paladins.

Because damn it all, when it came right down to it, Lance knew he couldn’t walk away. Not from this. Not from his team. They were falling apart. Fracturing. If there was anything he could do to hold them all together, point them in the right direction, then he would. Of course he would.

"I don't know what I'm doing," he said, and Ryner seemed to understand it was not a refusal this time.

She smiled, squeezing his shoulder. "I am here for you, Lance. Whatever you need."

Breathing deeply, Lance nodded. "Thanks," he said. "Right now what I need is some time to think." To think, and to come to grips with the situation. He looked up, expecting judgment in Ryner's eyes. All he found there, though, was calm. "Maybe later we can talk strategy?"

"Then I will return," she said. With one last pat on the shoulder, she turned, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

Lance sank into the seat behind him, burying his face in his hands. _Okay,_ he thought, laughing weakly. _I guess that's that._ He was in charge. He was responsible for the lives of his friends, and for bringing Shiro and Allura back. It still seemed ridiculous to him, but he couldn't waste any more time on incredulity. Not when there was work to be done.

Straightening up, Lance flipped on his display screen and started up the eshet simulator.

What he needed now was a plan.

* * *

Coran blinked his vision clear as he stared down at the status display for the three active cryopods. It had been several hours since he’d started this self-imposed vigil, and he’d already caught himself nearly dozing off twice.

 _None of that now,_ he told himself. It didn’t matter that the paladins’ conditions were improving more quickly than Coran had dared to hope. They weren’t out of danger yet, and that meant Coran had to remain vigilant. He cycled through the three charts quickly, scanning for red flags. The Altean boy, steadily improving, his Quintessence nearly cleaned out of that synthetic garbage Haggar had infected him with. Keith, stable but not yet back to baseline Quintessence levels for a Galra his size.

And Matt.

Coran sighed, glancing up at Matt’s pod. Ice frosted the glass, obscuring his face. The other two were stable enough that they’d already come up to Stage I stasis—similar to what the humans called anesthesia, which kept them asleep without drastically altering their other bodily processes. Matt, though, remained in Stage II, the primary form of stasis used in medical functions. Stage II was a little deeper than Stage I, slowing a body's functions enough to buy a little more time for the pod to work its restorative magic.

Coran told himself it could be worse. He could have had to push Matt to Stage III, the deepest stasis. It was Stage III that had suspended Coran and Allura's bodily functions, keeping them alive for ten thousand years. No healing could take place in Stage III; the body remained exactly as it had been, frozen in time. It was used for extended voyages where Quintessence was limited, or to preserve a badly injured patient until a specialist could come or an antidote be found. Or until family could be reached and given a chance to say goodbye.

Matt was not that far gone, thank the ancients. But he was in bad shape. Each time Coran tried to ease him into Stage I stasis, the crystal growth sped up, and Matt’s vital signs plummeted.

It made no sense. Matt’s Quintessence was already well below his baseline level and still dropping, but the crystals continued to feed. Odder still, Matt showed no signs of Quintessential stress. They would be subtle, for Coran hadn’t dared continue siphoning Quintessence too far beyond his target, but even so…

He frowned, telling the pod to siphon off a little more of Matt’s Quintessence. The level began to drop, slowly at first, then more rapidly.

And Matt’s condition was _improving._

Could it be that he still held an excess of Quintessence? That the crystals were still growing because his body didn’t need this much Quintessence? Alteans were known to have unusually large Quintessential reserves; perhaps humans did as well.

Curious.

The sound of a cryopod hissing open startled Coran out of his thoughts, and he looked up just in time to see the Altean boy hit the floor.

* * *

Pain.

Val’s body seemed fit to burst with it, a thousand little embers burning away within her bones, a thousand little lumps pressing at her skin, threatening to break the surface. She could feel them there—the crystals.

The thin red lines on her skin (the only signs left that she’d been cut open) barely registered anymore. Vanda had actually spared some of her alien healing tech on those, probably because she didn’t want Val to claw her wounds open and remove the _things_ they’d stuffed inside.

She shifted, trying to get comfortable in the dark corner of her cell she’d claimed as a bed, but even that little bit of movement caused the embers to flare up. Her breath caught in her throat, and she whimpered, hating her own weakness. Vanda hadn’t broken her. She _hadn’t_.

“Shh.” Cold hands reached out for her, helping her to sit up. Val clenched her teeth, riding out a wave of pain, then forced herself to breathe. Holding it all in only ever made the pain worse. “Better?”

Val offered Luis a feeble smile. He’d been downright civil to her lately, which was how she knew she was in bad shape. She almost wished he’d go back to complaining about all the trouble she raised with the guards and griping at her about her attitude. It might have helped her feel less like a victim.

It was hard _not_ to think of herself as a victim these days. Every time she closed her eyes, she found herself back in that awful lab, stark white walls dripping shadows where the harsh overhead lights didn’t reach; unforgiving straps holding her down; faceless figures moving in with scalpels that flashed like magnesium flares; pain. So much pain.

Val dug her nails into the palms of her hands, grounding herself in the here and now. She wasn’t on that operating table anymore. She hadn’t been for days, though Vanda kept finding other excuses to drag Val out of the cell block, to poke and prod her and shove her into a glass coffin that glowed too bright and left her aching.

No one had asked Val about the Altean cache in… how long had it been? Days? Weeks? Too much of her recent memory was wrapped up in the pain.

“I figured it out,” Val said. Speaking was a chore, but she’d finally, _finally_ pieced together Vanda’s plan. Enough of it, anyway. Enough of it to remind her why she had to get out of here. Get out and find Voltron and bring them back here to destroy everything Vanda was trying to do here.

“Figured it out…?” Luis frowned at her, and Val almost had to laugh.

“This,” she said, gesturing to a scar on her collarbone, thin and faint by now. That was her first incision, her first crystal implant. She gestured again to the cell around them. “What they’re doing here. What they want with us. They call it Project Balmera, you know.”

Yir shifted, perhaps turning toward Val. It was difficult to say, as they’d grown listless over the last few days. They were spared the worst of Vanda’s experiments—only the humans seemed to get that particular treatment, from what Val had seen—but they’d also been a captive much longer than Val had, and they didn’t do well watching Val suffer.

“Balmera...” Luis leaned back against the wall beside Val, frowning. “That’s the… crystal… power source... thing, right?”

“Planet-sized creatures which produce Quintessence and store it as crystals that can be used as power cells in ships and other machines,” Val said. She’d plied Yir for information every chance she got, both as a way to distract herself from the pain and in the hope of putting together the story behind Vanda’s invasion. Sometimes she managed to entice the prisoners in the neighboring cells to talk with her, and they supplied their own stories.

Sometimes Val could almost believe she’d visited one of these Balmera herself.

Val ran her fingers over the scar on her collarbone, feeling the small, smooth line and the hard lump underneath, buried in the meat of her shoulder. “The Galra… they take those Balmera crystals and they stick them in us. You know why?”

Luis hesitated. He hadn’t yet been drafted for Project Balmera, though Val knew it would only be a matter of time. “Do I want to?”

 _Probably not,_ Val thought. But now that she’d found her answers, she needed to share them with someone. She needed the comfort of knowing that even if she died, someone else might take these answers to someone who could help.

“We charge them somehow,” Val said. She closed her eyes, and it seemed she could see the crystals glowing behind her eyelids, that cold blue light that seemed so out of place here on Vanda’s warship. “I’ve seen them taking readings. Hooking me up to machines that won't turn on until I'm part of the circuit. I think... I think the crystals absorb our energy somehow.” She shook her head, laughing bitterly. “They’re turning us into fucking _batteries._ ”

This declaration was met with shocked silence, and Val opened her eyes to find Luis gaping at her. He’d gone pale, his body rigid. “They… No,” he said. “There’s no way—they wouldn’t--?”

Val arched an eyebrow, waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Of course they would,” she said when he didn’t continue. “Don’t worry, though. It’s not going to happen to you.”

“How can you be sure?”

Val leaned her head back, breathing in the pain. It had already begun to fade—the aches never lasted more than an hour or two after her sessions with Vanda’s scientists. The fatigue would come soon, and she would pass out until the next time the guards came to drag her away, but for now?

For now, she was ready to fight.

“Because, Luis. I’m breaking out of here. And I’m taking everyone with me.”

He stared at her like she was crazy. Hell, maybe she _was_. She’d spent too long in this cold, dark, dismal place, and it was draining the life out of her in more ways than one. She kept catching herself growing apathetic, accepting the hell her life had become. She couldn’t end the pain, so why bother fighting it? Better to just give up. Better to let the melancholy take her.

 _No._ She was Val Mendoza, and she had too goddamn much to do to die here.

“I won’t force you to come,” she said, “but c’mon. Anything’s got to be better than this. You with me?”

The silence stretched a moment longer, and then Yir shuffled closer. “You have a plan?”

Val nodded.

“Then I will join you. We may die, but it would still be better than wasting away here.”

“Luis?”

He paused, sighed, then shook his head. “Screw it. Fine.”

Val grinned—a little more genuine this time. Her pulse quickened as she hashed out her plan to Yir and Luis. It wasn’t much, as plans went, but Vanda’s guards had grown lax. Val had given them more trouble than any other prisoner, and even she’d cooled as the weeks wore on. She’d like to think that had been part of her plan, but the truth was they’d simply worn her down.

No more. She might die today (would almost certainly die today, carrying out her stupid, reckless plan) but she would take out as many of these bastards as she could. She was sick of being their punching bag. She was sick of pretending this was okay.

She was sick of waking up each day and wondering if this was the day she stopped believing she would make it home.

She had two things going for her, two things that gave her plan a shot at success, however slim. First, the ship was light on guards. It had taken Val some time to be sure, but she’d been out of the cell more times than she could count, often at random hours. Vanda liked to catch her off-guard or, that failing, interrupt her sleep for another session in the bright glass coffin.

Eventually, Val had begun to recognize the guards. They didn’t speak to her, and she didn’t bother trying to strike up a conversation, but she had names for them all. Pug-nose (the short, blocky one with an ugly little snout); Lilac (fur such a delicate shade of pale purple Val might have called it pretty if he hadn’t punched her across the face whenever she annoyed him); Hobbes (the striped one who liked to talk and was moderately less terrible than the others); and Bob (whose small, rounded ears, slit eyes, and fluffy cheek fur reminded Val keenly of a bobcat.)

She’d been keeping count, not just of the guards who watched the prisoners (twelve total—two at the outer door, two at the inner, rotating twice a day) but also of Vanda’s guards (eight, though she rarely had more than three with her at a time) and of the guards she saw patrolling the corridors or standing guard outside various rooms. It was much harder to count this last group, since nearly all of the regular patrols were robots, but she was fairly certain it was only those twenty live guards. It always took time for a guard to come when Vanda summoned them, and Val had heard more than one of the guards complain about staffing. Command, apparently, had denied requests for more troops.

Of course, there were other Galra. Researchers and mechanics and what-not. But if Val was quiet and if she was fast, she might be able to get out of here before anyone noticed the prisoners were gone.

The second point in Val’s favor, and perhaps the more important, was that there had never been an escape attempt on Vanda’s ship. No one but Val had even dared to fight back.

The Galra thought the humans were complacent. If Val could rile them up, the surprise factor alone might get them out of here. Some of them. She knew--she _knew_ \--that some of the prisoners would die in this attempt. But if it got the rest out, wasn't it worth it? (Sometimes, late at night when she planned her escape, that thought was enough to make Val sick.)

Luis and Yir seemed less than enthusiastic about Val’s plan, but they didn’t protest, just retreated to their positions in the front corners of the cell, a few paces from the door. Val watched them both, hoping she wasn’t signing them all up to get killed.

Then she started to scream.

She didn’t aim for defiance, not now. It would raise suspicions, for one thing, and anyway she wasn’t sure she was up to flinging insults at the people who’d taken great pains to make sure she knew they held her life in their hands.

Instead, she feigned a nightmare, thrashing on the ground and screaming bloody murder. God knew she’d had plenty of practice recently. Her throat hurt from the screaming, and one or two of the crystals ached sharply as she moved, but she kept it up, counting the seconds until the door slid open.

“What’s your problem?” Pug-nose demanded. “Hey. Hey!”

He strode forward, obviously ready to snap Val out of her nightmare—violently, if need be—while the second guard lingered in the hallway.

Val kept her eyes slitted, following Pug-nose’s advance and waiting. Waiting…

She snapped her mouth shut as Pug-nose reached out for her, then gathered her legs beneath her and sprang forward, tackling the guard around the knees. He shouted, fumbling for the gun strapped to his back as he went down, but Val was faster. She didn’t reach for the gun—he’d be expecting that, and it was too far out of her reach anyway.

But he had a small wand stuck through a loop on his hip, and Val knew from personal experience that the taser-like jolt it gave could be painfully incapacitating.

The second guard—Bob, Val thought, though she didn’t waste time checking—was yelling now, too, but Luis and Yir had sprung into action the moment Val struck. By the time she’d tased Pug-nose into unconsciousness and pried the rifle out of his hands, the other guard was similarly subdued.

“Grab him,” Val said, pointing to Bob’s limp form with the butt of her rifle. Luis had already grabbed Bob’s gun and stood staring at the far door, waiting for the second pair of guards to come see what was happening. Val left him to it and helped Yir drag Bob to the neighboring cell, where they pressed his hand to the scanner.

A moment later, the door hissed open, and Val peered in at three more frightened faces. “It’s okay,” she said. “We’re getting out of here.”

Her reassuring speech was cut short by the sound of laser fire, and she scrambled back into the hallway, gun raised (and ready to shoot her own hand off, in all likelihood), but Luis had already taken out the two guards who had finally showed their ugly faces.

Val glanced at him, and he shrugged. “I’ve been dreaming about doing that for ages,” he said simply.

Which, really, was all that needed to be said.

A few minutes later, all the cell doors were open, the prisoners clustered together in the aisle running down the center. Val counted them while Luis and some of the others dragged the guards, living and dead, into one of the cells. She pretended not to hear the two laser bursts that followed. It turned out she could still be horrified at these callous acts of violence—but she didn’t confront Luis when he emerged. He'd done what needed to be done.

There were two dozen prisoners, all together. Most were human, but five among them were aliens of various species, only three of whom could be called humanoid.

“Any of you know how to fly a space ship?” Val asked the aliens in a low voice. Two of the humanoids nodded and one of the others—a tentacled creature that looked like a jellyfish and had to be carried by one of their cellmates—whispered an affirmative. Val had her doubts that the jellyfish had the manual dexterity needed to pilot a Galra ship, but whatever. “Perfect,” she said. “Stay close. I’ll get us to the hangar, but we’ll need you to get us out of here.”

Not all of the prisoners were in anything approaching peak condition. Many walked with a limp or leaned heavily on their fellows. Some had gaping wounds that seemed infected, some seemed hardly to know what was happening at all.

“All right,” Val said, not letting the hopelessness of the situation get to her. They were getting out of here. A stampede of twenty-four prisoners—even if only half were capable of really stampeding—would intimidate even the most experienced guards. She hoped. “Let’s go.”

They hurried out of the cell block (hurried as much as the sick and injured prisoners allowed for), Val and Luis in the lead with the prisoners who’d taken up the third and fourth guards’ rifles. Really, Luis and a short-haired woman with a scar across her scalp led the charge, since they were the two who seemed to know how to handle a weapon. But Val, as the one who’d memorized the route to the hangar, needed to lead, so she got a gun by default.

They ran into a few guard patrols as they moved, but the sentries, as Val had noted during her captivity, only ever seemed to come in pairs. Poor planning, that.

Val kept intending to shoot the robots as they found them, but the other gunmen were faster, leaving Val nothing to do.

They were actually _doing_ this. Val laughed incredulously, her pace picking up as they reached the elevator. It was tight with two dozen people inside, but it had been built to transport someone or something much larger than a human, and everyone would rather be slightly squished than left behind.

When the doors slid open, they were on the deck that held the hangar. Just a few more turns and then--

An alarm began to blare, and Val’s steps faltered. Behind her, prisoners began to moan, shuffling backwards as though hoping they might be spared if they went back to the cells willingly.

“We’re almost there!” Val roared. “Come on!”

She didn’t wait to see if the prisoners would follow, just hefted her stolen gun and took off running, skidding around the corner ahead of her companions—and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun.

* * *

Eli was running on fumes. In the last week, he’d been to New York, Seattle, and San Fransisco, flying red-eye and crashing in cheap motels before getting in touch with the activists who’d organized marches against the Garrison. Then came an afternoon of filming, an evening of frantically uploading the footage, editing it down, and sending it along to local and national news outlets, packing up, and heading to the airport.

He’d been looking forward to coming home and letting himself relax for a day or two, but when his plane landed in Hobbs, he’d turned his phone on to texts from both Karen and Naomi telling him about a protest out at the Garrison.

He dialed Karen’s number as he got on the highway.

“Eli!” she said, sounding breathless. “You’re on the ground?”

Eli merged onto the highway, frowning at Karen’s tone. “Just leaving the airport. What’s this about a protest?”

“Iverson’s being a dick again.” Karen paused to shout something to someone nearby, and with his phone on speaker Eli couldn’t make out her words. “Sorry. He’s trying to court-martial Akira.”

“He’s _what_?” Eli asked. “Wait. I thought only soldiers could be court-martialed. Isn't Akira not technically a soldier?”

Karen snorted. “Yeah, well Iverson's slowly losing what little respect he still had for the legal system. He’s trying to say the Garrison is a military academy, so all staff are commissioned officers—and in that case, Akira’s subject to military law for any offenses committed while he was employed there.”

Eli changed lanes to pass a sedan doing five under the speed limit, glancing at a sign marking the distance to Carlsbad as it flashed past. “And what offenses are these? Wouldn't admitting that Akira released classified information just validate our claims?”

“It would,” Karen said. “Iverson's cooked up some bullshit assault case—says Akira wounded another faculty member when he started shooting off random firearms insde the dorms.”

“Another faculty member who was trying to _kill_ him at the time?”

There was a long, tight pause, and then Karen breathed out. “Naomi warned us a few hours ago—just in time for Akira to go hide at her house. I came home from work to Iverson standing in my living room and the whole house torn apart like I'd been burglarized. Lana looked ready to tear his face off.”

Scowling, Eli tightened his grip on the wheel. “If Iverson gets his hands on Akira, he’s going to go the same way as Val.” The same way as too many other people who had gone missing since Eli and the others broke the story. The protests he’d filmed had been dotted with names and faces Eli didn’t recognize, along with ones he knew only peripherally. Young people, many of them in college or just graduated, some barely out of high school—all gone.

Eli had interviewed as many people as he could find who knew their stories, and collected contact information for others. He had recordings and half-written biographies and photographs. The beginnings of a new campaign.

Iverson had to learn that he couldn’t do this without repercussions.

“I know,” Karen said. “But Akira’s safe, for now. We went public with it about an hour ago, and people have already started flocking to the Garrison to protest.” Another pause. “I don’t want to believe Iverson can make a hundred people disappear at once, but—Eli, I can’t take chances with that man. Not after everything else he’s done.”

Eli’s heart skipped a beat. “You’re not _there_ , are you?”

“No.” Karen practically spat the word, and Eli relaxed despite himself. “No, Akani convinced me that I can do more good waiting to demand the release of anyone Iverson does arrest tonight. And she convinced Lana that any of us being there would only make Iverson _more_ likely to do something rash, and that we can't risk it without the insurance of your livestream. We’re with Akira at Naomi’s place right now.”

Sighing, Eli rubbed his tired eyes. “All right. I’ve got all my equipment in the trunk. I’ll swing by the protest and start filming as soon as I can, but it’s going to be at least an hour.” He glanced at his speedometer and realized he was going nearly twenty over. “Make that forty-five minutes...”

“All right,” Karen said. “Be careful.”

Careful. Right. Eli had taken a lot of risks for the sake of some good footage in the past. He’d chased tornadoes, gotten as close as he was allowed to police standoffs, and stood at the edge of landslides and forest fires, never flinching.

This might just be the most dangerous thing he’d ever done.

But he was sick of bending to Iverson’s intimidation games. They all were. If Iverson wanted to sweep this story under the rug, then Eli would paste it across television screens all over the country.

By some miracle, he didn’t get pulled over on his way to Carlsbad, and he turned off the highway at the Garrison just after five. A slew of cars packed the road—overflow from the visitor’s lot, he wondered? Or had Iverson tried to shut them all out?

Another hundred feet up the road, the cars gave up on pulling off, parking instead wherever they happened to have stopped. Eli turned off the road, driving across desert scrub to get closer to the press of bodies at the gate. He didn’t stop until he was close enough for his cord to reach, then hastily set up the equipment, grabbed his camera, and started rolling.

There were no news vans here, no camera crews recording the face-off across the chain-link fence. Either Iverson had somehow managed to keep word of the protest from spreading, or he’d bribed and threatened the major stations into staying away.

Well, screw him.

Eli plunged into the crowd, panning from side to side, catching faces. He’d been leery at all the other protests of recording faces, afraid to inspire backlash against his fellow protesters, but tonight he wanted proof. Proof these people had been here. Proof, in case Iverson tried to make them disappear. Karen had agreed to hold the footage, rather than upload it directly to the website. It was insurance first, publicity only once they came through tonight and knew what story they needed to tell.

A few people noticed Eli with his camera and either recognized him or simply wanted to get away from the lens. The crowd parted around him, and though once or twice he felt someone snag on his cord, it didn’t pull free. Soon enough, the padlocked gate came into view.

Eli had been hearing shouts since he stepped out of the car, the vague, disgruntled sound of a protest on the verge of rioting, and he saw now where it was coming from. Garrison troops had lined up on the far side of the fence in full riot gear, and the front row of protesters—fifteen or twenty of them, at a glance—were shouting at the soldiers. Eli picked out snatches of questions and insults, Akira’s name, and Hunk's, and Lance's, and the Holts'. Iverson’s name came up more than any other, though he didn’t seem to be here tonight.

Eli watched it all through his camera’s lens, heart in his throat. Tensions were running hot, and he was scared to see where this would turn once the first person boiled over. He might have tried to diffuse the situation if he’d thought it would do any good.

Instead, he zoomed in tight on the faces of those nearest the gate.

The fence rattled as someone threw a rock, and the soldiers bristled, a few of them starting to press forward.

Somewhere to the right, someone screamed. Eli swung around, camera catching a cloud of white smoke billowing up through the crowd.

_Tear gas._

Eli was far enough away to be spared the worst of the effects, but his next breath started him coughing, and he backed away, helping those fleeing the gas. Some were retching, many crying, and Eli felt his ire rise. Iverson had been _waiting—_ he must have been. The tear gas had come too quick after that first rock was thrown.

 _Damn him,_ Eli thought, turning the camera back toward the gate just in time to see it roll aside, soldiers marching through with their gas masks and their riot shields and their batons.

The camera caught the first strike, a blow that cracked across a young man’s head, knocking him to the ground.

The line wavered, more than a few people turning to run. Others pressed forward, though, swarming the soldiers, driving them back as someone grabbed the fallen man and dragged him to safety.

None of this felt real.

Eli kept filming, trying to capture it all. He was still coughing, his eyes burning, but he gave no thought to running away. This was a story that _needed_ to be told.

It took him long seconds to realize someone was shouting at him to hand over the camera, that it was unlawful to bring any kind of recording device onto Garrison property. Eli opened his mouth to say Iverson had already tried that line on him once before, and only just spotted the baton swinging for his camera’s lens in time to scramble back.

Shouting rose all around, too much and too angry to pick out any words. The soldiers were still advancing on Eli, looking ready to beat him into submission. They wouldn’t be the only ones; all around, people were screaming, falling, bleeding. Some were helped along by fellow protesters, others grabbed by soldiers and dragged back toward the gate.

Just when Eli thought he was going to be overtaken, half a dozen figures broke away from the crowd, overwhelming the soldiers nearest Eli.

“Go!” one man shouted, turning back to Eli, who faltered, staring back. A young woman turned, nodding to him, and he realized the opening they were giving him. They knew who he was—or at least they knew the value in releasing footage of the protest.

Swearing under his breath, Eli turned and fled, praying the strangers would make it out of here alive.

* * *

Coran was at the boy’s side in a second, reaching out cautiously, wanting to help him up but afraid that a near-stranger in such close proximity would spook the boy.

Well, it was too late for that now. Coran was already down on one knee beside the boy, but he waited for the boy to notice him before offering him a hand to help him up. The boy stared at Coran’s hand for a long moment before accepting the help up. It took him a moment to find his balance—hardly surprising so soon after a jaunt in the cryopods—but even once he was steady, he didn’t pull away from Coran.

“How are you feeling, then?” Coran asked.

The boy seemed to consider this for a moment. “Fine,” he said at length. “Better.”

Coran smiled. “Well. That’s a start.” He nodded toward the door to the med bay. “Want to go sit down in there with me? I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”

The boy nodded and let Coran steer him through the door. They sat together on the edge of a bed, legs dangling. A thousand questions pressed at Coran’s mind, but he calmed them. This was the time for a gentle touch; Coran didn’t want to overwhelm the poor lad with an interrogation. So he started with the most important question:

“What’s your name?”

In all honesty, Coran was expecting more silence. That this boy had spoken at all was something of a surprise, though Coran supposed a few hours’ rest, relief from the small hurts dealt to him during his imprisonment, and the restoration of his Quintessence to a healthy strain would do a lot to ease his mind.

“Othwyn,” the boy said. “But everyone just calls me Wyn.”

“Wyn.” Coran smiled, laying a hand over his heart in a traditional greeting. “I am Coran.”

Wyn cocked his head to the side, staring at Coran’s hand in confusion. Suddenly his face lit up, his mouth rounding in understanding. He interlaced his fingers at the level of his navel, palms facing up, little fingers brushing against his stomach. Sitting as he was, the gesture was a bit awkward, but Coran mimicked it as well as he could.

The smile that lit Wyn’s face at the sight was worth the awkwardness and more, and Coran inclined his head. “It’s very good to have you on the Castle of Lions, Wyn.” He paused, noting the way Wyn shifted like he wanted to ask a question. “No need to be shy. What's on your mind?”

“Are… are you really the paladins of Voltron?”

Coran tried not to look too surprised. Word of Voltron must have spread quite far by now, after all the paladins had done to fight Zarkon, but according to Keith, Wyn had been a prisoner since well before the first paladins had been chosen. “I’m not,” Coran said, “but the ones who rescued you are. Lance—the one who let you borrow his armor—is the blue paladin, and Allura, the other Altean you saw, she’s one of the black paladins.”

Pain twinged inside Coran at the thought of Allura. She would have been so happy to know Wyn was awake. She’d have so many questions for him. He hoped desperately that they would have the opportunity to meet.

To his credit, Wyn seemed to take the news in stride, nodding slowly and picking at the cuff of his medsuit.

“We can get you some clothes in a tick,” Coran assured him. “Just as soon as--”

There was a scuffling at the door from the corridor, then a hurried shushing. Coran stood, crossing swiftly to the door and standing so his body blocked Wyn’s view. Tapping the controls to open the door partway, Coran peered out at three of the Galra youngsters. Edi and Dagmar, Allura’s shadows, were there, along with Maka, the oldest of the children at thirteen standard. Maka and Dagmar strained in an effort to peek around Coran, while Edi just sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose.

“Is he in there?” Maka asked.

Coran shifted slightly, pointedly blocking the boy’s line of sight. “Is who in there?”

“The Altean kid,” Dagmar said, planting her hands on her hips. “Tev said you’d rescued an Altean boy. Is that him? Can we see him?”

 _Tev._ Of course it was Tev. Coran sighed, reminding himself that Tev wasn’t much more than a child, either, and he could hardly be blamed for gossiping about the rescue of someone who shouldn’t have existed at all. “I’m sorry,” Coran said. “He needs his rest. Maybe some other time.” Sometime when Coran could be sure that the sight of three very loud, very nosy Galra wouldn’t drive Wyn into a panic.

The children deflated, but they obediently scurried away, and Coran closed the door before turning back to Wyn.

“Sorry about that. This ship’s been getting a lot busier lately.”

Wyn only smiled, running a hand over his short, dark curls. The burns in his scalp were gone now, though it would take a little more time for the hair to grow back. If any of the burns had scarred, the hair at that spot might not grow back at all.

Coran headed back toward the bed, but a soft, insistent alarm from the pod bay distracted him. Coran hesitated, reluctant to leave Wyn—but given Matt’s current state, that alarm might be more urgent than it appeared.

“Sorry,” Coran said. “I need to see to that. I’ll be back in two ticks.”

* * *

“Is he gone?”

Maka ignored Dagmar’s question—and Edi’s annoyed frown—and pressed his ear to the med bay door. He’d been ready to give up and go back and let Nyrok see him off to bed (honest) when he’d heard the alert go off from the pod room. Something like that Coran was sure to check on, which meant the Altean kid would be without his babysitter for a few minutes.

That was the theory, anyway.

“I think so,” Maka whispered. “Hard to tell. He’s vrekking quiet.”

“All Alteans are quiet,” Dagmar said matter-of-factly, as if she knew more than two Alteans. As if any of them knew whether Coran and Allura’s silent footsteps were natural or all part of the “Mysterious Keepers of the Castle of Lions” act they put on for their guests.

Maka snorted, then reached out for the door controls. Edi grabbed his wrist before he could touch the controls, though, then scowled at him.

“Coran said to leave him alone.”

“Yeah, well Coran also says not to fight the gladiator without supervision, _Edi_.”

Edi’s ears pressed flat against her head, and Dagmar let out a scandalized _Ooh_ that only made Edi squirm more. “I never--”

“Tik saw you,” Maka said, puffing out his chest. “From the vents. And _he_ told _me_ , so _I_ camped out the next night to see for myself. You’re lucky you haven’t needed a pod yet, or Allura would skin you alive.”

To her credit, Edi managed not to look too intimidated by Maka’s blackmail—but she really needed to get control of her ears if she wanted to look the princess in the eye and lie about her late-night training exercises. (Honestly, Maka would have been proud of her, breaking rules like this, if she hadn’t been so stinking embarrassed about it.)

“Anyway.” Maka shook off Edi’s hand and reached out again for the door controls. “If you let me go meet this kid, I promise not to tell anyone what you’re up to. Deal?”

He pressed the button, but Edi pressed it again half a second later. “No,” she said. “Leave him alone. Poor guy’s probably scared. Tev said they rescued him from a prison ship!”

Maka rolled his eyes. “All the more reason to cheer him up!” He opened the door again, and again Edi closed it before it moved a hand-width. They went back and forth like that a few times before a voice from inside the med bay interrupted them.

“I know you’re out there.”

Maka froze, Edi’s hand fighting his for position over the door controls, and the door—finally—slid fully open. The Altean boy sat on a bed inside the room, knees tucked up under his chin. He watched them with wide eyes, the yellow marks on his cheeks—almost the same color as Galra eyes—bright against his dark brown skin.

“It’s okay,” the boy murmured. “You can come in.”

Dagmar was the first to move, ducking under the tangle of arms and dashing to the Altean boy’s bedside. She leaned her hands on the mat and peered up at him, ears quivering with excitement. “You really are Altean!”

The boy leaned back, blinking at Dagmar, and frowned. “Uh… yes?”

“They thought it was just a rumor,” Edi said with a sigh. She finally untangled herself from Maka, shot him a murderous look, then stepped through the door. “Don’t _smother_ him, Dagmar.”

Dagmar backed off, ears drooping, but Maka quickly took her place, hopping up beside the boy and holding out a hand. It was a very human gesture, the handshake, but Maka didn’t know how Alteans introduced themselves and he figured a Galra salute was too stuffy for something like this. “I’m Maka.”

The boy stared down at Maka’s hand, frowning, then cautiously reached out and poked it. “What are you doing?”

“I dunno.” Maka shrugged. “The paladins do it all the time, though. Here, hold out your hand like I’m doing.”

The Altean held out his hand, and Maka grabbed it, shaking it up and down a few times.

“There,” he said. “Now we’re friends.”

The boy just stared.

Edi sighed again, grabbing Maka by the shoulders and scooting him away from the boy. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m Edita. That’s Dagmar. What’s your name?”

Slowly, the boy relaxed, offering them a small, warm smile. “Wyn,” he said. “My name’s Wyn.”

* * *

Keith was leaning out of his pod, breathing hard, when Coran came in. A glance at the computer said he’d only just finished the cycle, but his Quintessence was back up to normal levels. Matt’s were still dropping—and still _improving_ his other vital signs.

 _Quiznak!_ Coran thought. _How much Quintessence do these humans hold?_

That was a problem for another time. Coran moved away from the console and reached out for Keith as he took his first shaky step away from the pod. He lifted one hand to his head, gripping Coran’s shoulder with the other, and let himself be guided toward one wall, where a small, padded bench rose from the floor to accommodate them.

“How are you feeling?” Coran asked.

Keith grimaced. “Like I just got tossed to the Vkullor for an afternoon snack.”

Well, that was fair. He _had_ nearly died. “Do you remember what happened?”

“We were fighting Shiro,” Keith said. His words came slowly, his eyes searching the floor like he might find the answers there. “Allura connected to him through the Black Lion, and then...”

Closing his eyes, Keith dropped his hand from his head to his chest, where his armor (abandoned in the med bay awaiting repairs) bore five small punctures ringed in black from the druidic magic that had drained his Quintessence.

“He’s still in there.”

Coran frowned. “I'm sorry...?”

Keith looked up, his eyes burning. “Shiro. I heard him, at the end. He’s still in there. Haggar’s suppressing him, but she hasn’t destroyed him. _We can save him, Coran._ ”

Something in his voice, the sharp edge, or maybe the way his claws tightened on his black undersuit, gave the words a slightly hysterical quality, though Keith’s face remained impassive. It occurred to Coran that Keith might not have fully believed they _could_ get Shiro back before now.

With a soft smile, Coran laid a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “We _will_ save him.”

Keith nodded, then grimaced and clutched at his forehead. “Ugh. What did Haggar _do_ to me?”

Coran didn't argue the phrasing of Keith's question; it was more accurate to blame Haggar for this than Shiro anyway. “Drained your Quintessence.” Coran paused only slightly before adding, “All of it.”

Keith’s head snapped up. “ _What?_ And I’m not _dead_?”

“You can thank Lance for that.” Coran smiled at Keith’s baffled look, glancing at the pod where Matt still rested. The crystals across his face had retreated somewhat, if not nearly enough for Coran’s taste. With luck, Shay would be able to help with that.

Keith’s breath hissed through his teeth as he spotted Matt. He was on his feet in an instant, wavering slightly before crossing to Matt’s pod. He stopped a few inches short, his hand hovering just off the glass, and stared up at him. “What…?”

“The Quintessence you lost, it… well, it ended up in Matt’s body,” Coran said. “The crystals reacted quite… energetically.”

“I thought healing pods would only make it worse.” Keith turned, searching Coran’s face. “Don’t they run on Quintessence?”

“We’re using this one to draw the Quintessence out of him,” Coran explained. “It’s helping.” He wouldn’t say that Matt was okay—not yet. He _would_ be okay, eventually. Coran hoped he would. But he still had a long road ahead of him. “The battle went poorly.”

Keith snorted, his gaze returning to Matt. “I can see that.”

Coran breathed in deeply, then let it out in a sigh. “Haggar took Allura.”

Keith stiffened for a moment, and then his shoulders seemed to slump. “That’s right… I remember now. After Shiro and Allura connected, Haggar showed up. She said that it had somehow given her access to Allura’s mind.” He turned, brow furrowed. “Did they take the Black Lion, too?”

Coran nodded.

“Vrekt.”

“Indeed.” Another sigh pressed at Coran, but he staved it off. There had been altogether too much of that today. Wyn had woken up. Keith had woken up. Matt was in much better condition now than he had been a few hours ago. Now was the time to breathe, and to prepare. “You should go find Lance—he was quite worried about you, you know. I’m sure it would do him some good to see you’re all right.”

Keith blinked, slow to drift away from Matt’s pod. “Really? Huh.” He fell silent, and Coran quietly shooed him toward the door.

“Bridge,” he said. “At least, that was where he was last I knew. Probably still trying to come up with a plan for getting Shiro and Allura back.”

Keith nodded, and once he’d gone Coran hurried back to the med bay to check on Wyn. He stopped in the door, heart seizing up at the sight of three of the Galra children gathered around Wyn—Maka on the bed next to him, swinging his feet; Dagmar in front of him, leaning against his legs and staring up at him in wide-eyed wonder; and Edi, hovering a foot or two away and glancing nervously at the door.

Seeing Coran, she shrank back, muttering something under her breath that made Dagmar and Maka look up in a panic.

Glancing at the other three in confusion, Wyn followed their gazes. When he spotted Coran, he smiled, and Coran forced himself to breathe. The boy didn’t look distressed by his unexpected company. If anything, he looked… happy?

“Everything all right in here?” Coran asked, trying to keep his voice light—for all the children’s sakes. Dagmar and Maka never meant any harm by their mischief, and Edi seemed to honestly be trying to stay responsible. They couldn’t have realized what Wyn’s captivity might have done to him. What it might do to him to be reminded of his captors.

Wyn nodded. “They were just telling me about the castle.”

“Ah.” Coran stepped forward, tension unwinding as he forced himself to move. “Sorry for the surprise, my boy. I was going to tell you about our Galra refugees...”

“It’s fine,” said Wyn. He shrugged like it was nothing, but he caught Coran’s eye, and Coran realized he knew exactly what Coran didn’t want to say in front of the other youngsters. _Is this okay? Are Galra okay?_ “There’s tons of Galra on New Altea.”

The words were tossed out almost casually—so casually, in fact, that they nearly slipped under Coran’s radar. He found himself already nodding along by the time he realized what Wyn had said. “New Altea? Is that where you’re from, then?”

Wyn nodded and, seeing Maka and Dagmar’s looks of open curiosity (and Edi’s slightly more guarded one), he said, “It’s a sanctuary world. Somewhere Zarkon can’t go.” He paused, scrunching his nose in concentration as he went on, seemingly quoting something from memory. “Ten thousand years ago, the Last King stood against all of Zarkon’s forces for five days and five nights so the people of Altea could flee the invasion. Zarkon hunted them down, but the True Galra—the ones who didn’t like what Zarkon was doing—they helped our ancestors get away. Together the Alteans and the True Galra went into hiding. They rebuilt, and they started fighting back, and they called the planet they founded New Altea.”

Coran found himself sitting down, quite abruptly, on the bed opposite Wyn, which made the boy look up in alarm. Coran waved a hand to fend off his concern, trying to ignore the tears in his eyes. _New Altea._ It was _real._ There were Alteans out there—Alteans who still remembered something of the days before the war. Alteans who still remembered _King Alfor._

He wondered, with some measure of detachment, whether Wyn knew any stories about the paladins of old. Stories about Allura. Stories about _him._

“So what are you doing _here_?” Dagmar asked, leaning harder on Wyn’s knees. “If you’re supposed to be in hiding, why aren’t you… well… hidden?”

Wyn’s smile faltered. “I got captured,” he said in a small voice, and his audience all gave gasps of sympathy. Wyn pulled his legs up, displacing Dagmar, who looked like she might start crying at any moment. “I got captured, and they sent me to the Arena, but the Champion saved me.”

Edi gave a start. “Champion?” She glanced at Coran. “Isn’t that what Shiro used to be called?”

Coran wasn’t sure where Edi had heard anyone talking about Shiro’s past, but Wyn had sat up straight, glancing from Edi to Coran and back again. “You know him? He’s here?”

“No, he’s not here.” Coran paused. He wanted very much to shield Wyn from the realities of this war, but one glance at the other kids told him nothing was likely to stay a secret for long. Besides, Wyn was hardly innocent anymore. “He’s in danger right now—but we’re going to get him back.”

Wyn clenched his jaw. “I want to help.”

Coran had a sudden, vivid image of Wyn charging Haggar with nothing but a toy sword. He shivered and banished the image before his mind could carry it to its inevitable conclusion. “Well,” he said. “We could always use more help on the bridge. I could show you around…?”

Wyn opened his mouth—maybe to say that he’d rather be out with the paladins—then shut it again and nodded.

“Wonderful!” Coran stood up, his legs only a little shaky, and shooed the other children out of the room before turning and placing a hand on Wyn's shoulder. He looked small and hesitant and uncertain, but he straightened a little at Coran's smile. There was still a war on--Matt was still in the pods, Shiro and Allura still out there, still in Haggar's hands. The other paladins needed Coran.

But he would allow himself this small comfort. An hour with Wyn, an hour to remember that some good remained in the universe.

Then he would throw himself back into the fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Also! Pechat drew Val! [Look at her!](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/160453211069/seamarmot-val-mendoza-from-squirenonnys-great) You have amazing timing, Pechat. ;)


	21. What Is Necessary

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Haggar has taken Shiro and Allura, along with the Black Lion. Keith and Matt were badly wounded in the fighting, and though Keith recovered after a few hours in stasis, Matt is still suffering the effects of a massive influx of Quintessence, which caused his crystals to grow out of control.
> 
> In the wake of three back-to-back battles, the team is hanging on by a thread, anxiety and frustration putting everyone on edge. Lance took charge, giving the team direction as they prepared to go back for their captive friends, then sat down to come up with a plan of attack. Meanwhile Wyn, the young Altean rescued from Haggar's ship, emerged from the cryopod and revealed that he comes from New Altea, a sanctuary world populated by both Alteans and Galra.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've added several more ficlets to the fluff collection, [Finding Family](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10807746/chapters/23977413). I've got just a few more prompts to fill before I wrap that collection up so I can move on to the next side story, which will go up with chapter 24, but if you have a desperate need for character(s) who haven't been featured yet, I'll still accept prompts through tomorrow (Tuesday) either here or on Tumblr [@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com).
> 
> Also, go look at [this adorable art of Azra](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/160567402669/imakethingsigrowthings-ive-been-sucked-into-the), because everyone needs an adorable Galra child twirling in a dress to brighten their day. :)
> 
> \--
> 
> A couple of special warnings for this chapter: The first scene includes suicidal ideation along with more general talk of death and violence. You can very easily skip to the first scene break and start reading at, "Shiro closed his eyes," if you need to.
> 
> There's also just... a lot of anxiety in this chapter, including a couple minor panic attacks. Nothing significantly more intense than the rest of this arc, but pervasive enough that it's not easily skippable, so take care. <3

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #516  
>  Dated three months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> Prisoner 117-9875 [Pidge’s Note: Shiro] was reintroduced today to the Arena for testing of his prosthetic arm and override chip. The demonstration went well, although questions were raised about the long-term efficacy of the program, given 117-9875’s reaction to the procedure.
> 
> Unfortunately, despite Lady Haggar’s protests, the subject has been removed from the project and delivered into the custody of another Prince. According to reports, the prisoner has volunteered for active duty and has sworn fealty to Emperor Zarkon.
> 
> We have been permitted to keep the override chip active as a precautionary measure against the prisoner’s probable betrayal.

* * *

_Matt lay screaming on the ground, crystals sprouting from his skin. Beyond him was Keith, too still and small for the one who had defied his entire race to keep Shiro out of Haggar's hands the first time around.  
_

“No...”

_Specters of Keith and Matt stood over their crumpled bodies, staring down at them with blank expressions. They seemed… confused. Keith’s specter was thin, nearly translucent, and seemed unaware of anything but himself. And maybe not even of that much._

_Matt, though, blazed with light, currents of blue running beneath his skin and pooling in his eyes. When he looked up, the accusation behind his eyes cut Shiro to the core._

“ _You did this, Shiro. You killed us.”_

“Matt… I’m sorry… Keith…”

Something cold and soft brushed against his forehead, startling him from the dream. “It’s all right, Shiro,” Allura whispered. “You’re all right.”

Shiro opened his eyes to darkness. A sliver of light bled in beneath the door of their cell, and it was just enough for Shiro to make out Allura’s outline bending over him. Their cell would have been small for a single prisoner; with both of them in here, it was downright claustrophobic. Allura sat against the back wall, Shiro’s head in her lap. He didn’t have room to straighten his legs, and one of his knees ached from banging it against the wall while he was under.

It wasn’t sleep that took him periodically, though he tried to convince himself it was. Sleep would have meant rest. Sleep would have meant nightmares instead of memories.

“I killed them,” he whispered, staring down at his prosthetic arm. It glowed almost imperceptibly, the way a lightbulb clung to the last traces of light for a moment after it was switched off. He could see where the metal ended, could see vague impressions of his fingers as he forced himself to relax his fist. He could see the fissure running from his wrist nearly to his elbow. That break made it difficult to move the arm—but it also made it difficult for Haggar to maintain control. She kept appearing in his mind, plunging him beneath the surface of a dark, icy lake, only to fade again and allow his mind to surface for another desperate gasp of air.

“You didn’t kill them, Shiro,” Allura said in her frustratingly even voice. She brushed his bangs off his forehead. “They’re still alive.”

“Did you see them?” he demanded. “After I…Fuck." Tears pressed against the back of his eyes, a physical pressure that was getting increasingly difficult to ignore.

Allura’s hand stilled for a moment, and she sighed, the sound reminding Shiro how exhausted she was. Whenever Shiro plunged into the darkness, she was taken, too. “No. I didn’t see them.”

“I did,” Shiro said. He couldn’t _stop_ seeing them: two of the people he cared for most in this universe, dying from wounds _he_ had inflicted. He hoped Allura was right—hoped _desperately_ he hadn’t actually killed them—but he couldn't make himself believe.

They were dead.

Shiro had killed them.

And what if they _had_ survived? Neither of them would ever be able to look at him again. Neither of them would ever trust him. ( _And they’re right,_ Shiro thought. _They never should have trusted me to begin with._ )

“There’s still time,” Shiro whispered. “You could still--”

“I won’t.” Allura’s voice was hard, and the hand that wasn’t combing through his hair tightened its grip on his shirt. “I’m not going to kill you, Shiro.”

Shiro sighed. They’d had this argument before, several times. Shiro had pointed out how easy it would be for Allura to break his neck. With a little bit of Quintessence, she could change her form into something that could crush his skull or slit his throat. She’d been shifted at the time, compacting her body in an attempt to give them both a little more room to breathe.

She wasn’t shifted now, and Shiro had to wonder how much of that was exhaustion, and how much that she didn’t want to give him more ideas.

But he was too tired to argue now. Too tired to point out what had to be done. Too tired to remind Allura, _again_ , that he was the only reason Haggar had control of her. _Kill me, and she can’t get to you._ _You’d be free._

Allura would hear none of it. Even though they were the black paladins—decisive, rational. The ones who made hard decisions for the greater good.

In this, Allura refused to consider the one option available to them, and Shiro was finding it harder and harder to care that it meant she was putting them all at risk. Soon enough Haggar would reassert her control, and Shiro would find himself standing once more over Matt and Keith’s dead bodies, and when he woke again nothing would have changed.

He was glad for the darkness of their cell as the tears finally began to fall.

Haggar did come eventually—but this time, she came in person, flanked by four other druids. The cell door opened onto a hallway filled with blinding light, and Allura roared as two of the druids grabbed Shiro and dragged him from the cell. He fought, lashing out with more energy than he thought he’d had, but the druids seemed not to notice his thrashing.

The cell door slamming shut cut off Allura’s cries, and Shiro fought to get his feet under him as he was dragged down the corridor. If he could just stand up, if he could just find his balance, then he would be able to fight back in earnest. Maybe he could get away. Maybe he could at least force Haggar to kill him.

But his body refused to cooperate. With Haggar so close, he seemed to hang on the edge of oblivion, only tethered to himself by the pulsing agony where his prosthetic arm joined with his body. The edges of the crack had begun to glow faintly purple, the way they always did just before Haggar took over.

He drifted, and by the time he returned to himself he was strapped to a table in one of Haggar’s labs, his right arm spilling bits of ruined mechanics across the table. Pain twinged up his arm as pieces were torn out and replaced, the new connections somehow even more painful than the old rot being cut away.

Shiro struggled weakly, his energy all but sapped, his mind already filling with a deep, choking fog. Haggar’s eyes swam through his vision, bright and cruel.

“Sleep now, my Champion. It will all be over soon.”

* * *

Shiro closed his eyes and found himself in empty space. He didn’t think he’d physically changed location, or at least he wasn’t aware of having a physical body wherever this was. He wasn’t standing on a solid surface, nor was he floating. He simply… _was._ A weary mind in an endless void.

_This is new._

He thought he spoke the words aloud, but with no mouth to speak and no ears to hear if he’d made a sound, it was difficult to tell. Still… he almost felt as if another voice had spoken at the same time, a tickle at a corner of his awareness that seemed to say, _Here again?_

Slowly, the darkness receded, like a sunrise in timelapse. He didn't open his eyes; it was more like the world resolved around him. One minute he was nowhere, and then he was in a hangar. He tried to look around, but his head refused to cooperate—he _had_ a head again, or so he thought, but it no longer listened to his commands.

_Haggar._

Dread seeped into Shiro’s veins. As if it weren’t bad enough knowing the witch had control of him. Was she going to force him to watch as she tore the rest of his team apart?

What he could see of the hangar was brightly lit, a few deep shadows clinging to the upper corners of the space. There were no ships, unless they sat behind him; in fact the hangar seemed deserted. There weren’t even any mechanics around, or guards to watch him for signs of resistance.

Then again, he didn’t think he could have broken Haggar's control, however hard he tried. He was aware of his body, distantly, and of the ground beneath his feet. But whenever he reached out for a hand, or an eye, or any piece of him, there seemed to be a wall standing between him and his body. It was locked down, and Shiro didn’t have the key.

A door opened, and Shiro’s heart plummeted as Zarkon strode in, dressed in his blood-red armor, a slate gray cape eddying around his legs. His eyes—violet eyes, eyes the color of corrupted Quintessence—stared directly into Shiro’s.

“Are you ready to surrender yet?” Zarkon’s voice sent a chill through Shiro. He’d seen the man only twice: once somewhere in the fog of disjointed memories from the day of his capture and once on the day he’d lost his arm, when Zarkon had ordered Shiro to kill an Altean child.

Was all this just more punishment for that moment of defiance?

Shiro kept his mouth shut, refusing to dignify Zarkon’s question with a response.

A slight frown was the only reaction Zarkon gave. “You cannot resist me forever. A weapon is only as strong as the hand that wields it, and _I_ am far stronger than you realize. I will not be stopped by your foolish pride.”

He spat the last word, and Shiro growled—a low, rumbling sound deep in his chest, a sound of anger and helplessness. Hatred simmered in his gut, hatred for who Zarkon was, who he had become. He hadn’t always been a monster like this. Once, he’d been a great man. A leader.

Now look at him.

Zarkon’s eye twitched, and he raised his hand, the black bayard glowing with violet light. It did not assume the shape of a weapon—not yet—but Shiro felt it tug at him, as if it had reached inside him and latched onto his heart.

“You are _mine,_ ” Zarkon growled. “You will always be mine. Or have you forgotten?”

The bayard pulsed white, and Shiro’s vision changed. He looked out over a planet he didn’t recognize—yet somehow he knew it was the Galra homeworld. It looked broken. Shattered. A massive crater had been carved out of the planet’s surface, nearly an entire hemisphere ripped away. A number of natural satellites ringed the planet—none of them large enough to be called a moon. Most likely it was rubble left over from the collision that had damaged the planet.

The wound cut to the planet’s very core, where Shiro could see something flickering like lightning inside a cloud. A crystal, he realized. A massive crystal—more opaque than a Balmera crystal, with coloring like an amethyst—lay at the core of the world. It was a raw crystal, lumpy and dull except where some great force had shattered it, exposing a few smooth faces to the void of space.

Anger swirled within Shiro, and it took him some time to realize that anger was not his own.

“Look at what has become of us,” Zarkon whispered. He sounded younger than the Zarkon Shiro knew. An image flashed through Shiro’s mind—Zarkon as a young man, without the scar down his face, with yellow eyes instead of violet. “Is it any wonder they rail against the Alliance?”

Shiro rumbled discontentedly—except it wasn’t Shiro. It was his mind, and his voice, but it was not his will.

At Zarkon’s urging, the Black Lion turned and descended toward what remained of the Galra homeworld.

The scene shifted, spinning around him as Shiro tried to regain his bearing. The Black Lion. These were the _Black Lion’s_ memories. He looked through her eyes, felt the things she felt, as though--

His vision cleared, and he stared down at a much younger Zarkon. He was shorter, more slender, and he seemed to be in awe of the lion towering over him. Shiro tried not to think how much this younger man looked like Keith. He had a different face, but the same eagerness traced the lines of his body; the same determination burned behind his eyes.

There were other people ranged around Zarkon, four of them, all dressed in paladin armor. Shiro glanced from one to the next, some corner of his mind, or Black’s, supplying names.

The green paladin, slender and furred, his tail lashing behind him in anxious anticipation, his eyes fond whenever they fell on Zarkon. _Sa._ They were similar in age, Sa only recently chosen by his own lion, and they’d become close friends during these last weeks of training. Already, Sa would follow Zarkon into a Destroyer’s mouth.

The yellow paladin, big and burly, her eyes proud. _Rukka._ She’d helped train Zarkon, and some part of her had thought perhaps he might be chosen as her successor. He’d gravitated more toward Black from the very start, of course, but he still often sought out the Galra Paladin—a legend to him growing up, and a mentor here on the Castle of Lions.

The red paladin, tall and regal, her hands clasped behind her back. _Keturah._ The Black Lion remembered her wild youth, but time had tempered her, turned her into a cunning strategist and a shrewd diplomat. She had that subtlety so common among Altean nobility, but her eyes shone with deepest respect. She saw Zarkon’s potential, perhaps better than anyone else.

The blue paladin, all but bouncing on her toes as she waited for the Black Lion to accept Zarkon as her new paladin. _Mother._

Wait.

_Mother?_

All at once, Shiro was aware of another presence in his mind—and she of him. The Black Lion rumbled, unsettled by the disturbance, but Shiro and Allura were too busy searching each other for new hurts. Shiro found none. Allura's mind was taken up with something called the Heart of the Black Lion, a non-space very much like the void they’d woken up in after Haggar regained control.

 _**You were lost,** _ the Black Lion said. _**I called you to me.** _

_Called?_ Shiro wondered.

_**It is safer.** _

There was no time to talk more. Zarkon was still assaulting the Black Lion with memories. Shiro could make little sense of them; they seemed to skip forward and back in time without pattern. Battles, training, negotiations. Many of them were happy memories, and Shiro couldn’t help feeling a little untethered as he realized that of the three minds watching these memories, he was the only one for whom the idea of a kind, smiling Zarkon was a contradiction.

Allura and the Black Lion may have hated Zarkon, but they’d both loved him, once.

The more Shiro saw, the more a pattern emerged. Zarkon was too well-respected—by his lion as well as by the other paladins—for them to disagree with him. In the rare case that someone did voice a concern with one of his plans, he swayed them quickly. He didn’t use threats or intimidation, but neither did he actually acknowledge their concerns. He was charismatic and well-loved, and all it took was a simple joke or a gentle nudge to _trust me_ , and the opposition fell away.

Except when it was Black who disagreed. Then Zarkon’s charm was gone, his silver tongue replaced with an iron fist as he simply thrust his bayard into the lion's control panel and forced her to obey his orders.

The scene changed again. They stood now inside the Black Lion’s cockpit, Zarkon seated at the controls. Black sat on a rocky hill overlooking a city that neither Shiro nor Allura recognized.

 _**The Galra capital,** _ Black supplied. Shiro felt Allura’s shock.

“You _lied_ to me, Alfor,” Zarkon spat. He had a comms channel open on his viewscreen, and a weary King Alfor looked back at him, unblinking.

“I didn’t lie,” he said calmly. “I simply didn't see the need to brief you on every matter to cross my desk, especially as it had nothing to do with Voltron.”

Zarkon’s hands clenched around the armrests of his chair. “They are my people, Alfor. Whether or not it was relevant to Voltron, it was relevant to _me._ ”

“You are a paladin now. The black paladin. Your duty is to something much larger than the planet on which you were born. You must learn to let go.”

“Let go?” Zarkon asked, his voice a dangerous rumble in the back of his throat. “Let go? The way you have learned to let go, Alfor? The way you have learned not to meddle in the business of peoples and planets who neither need nor _want_ your ‘guiding hand?'”

Venom dripped from Zarkon’s words, and something dark flickered across Alfor’s face in response. He smoothed it out, straightening his back. The conversation had seemed, at first, a simple rift between two friends. Now it seemed a king addressing his subject.

“It’s been five weeks, Zarkon. You’ve had more than enough time to stabilize the situation. It’s time you return to the castle. I’ll deal with whatever mess you leave behind.”

Anger and disgust rolled off Zarkon in waves, strong enough to fill the cockpit. Shiro felt something in him stir in response to the emotions, an automatic sympathy that made him feel sick. It took a moment to realize it wasn’t his own emotions betraying him, but Black’s. She shrank back from him now, shame filling her.

 _I don’t understand,_ Allura said before Shiro could figure out how to comfort their lion.

_What do you mean?_

_This conversation shouldn’t have happened. They said Zarkon has been here for five weeks, but... Father told us Zarkon cut contact just a few days after arriving on the Galra homeworld. Father said he'd tried to reach out to Zarkon to find out what had happened, but he refused to answer the transmissions.  
_

He had lied.

Neither of them thought the words, but the knowledge floated in the bond, intangible and unignorable. Alfor had lied about being in contact with Zarkon in the days leading up to the war. And if he had lied about that, what else might he have lied about?

The view of the Galra capital blurred, another scene already forming in its wake. Fuming, Shiro forced it away. He was done playing this game. He was done letting Zarkon torment Black and Allura with old wounds. The memory wavered, Zarkon trying to reinforce the illusion, but then Allura was pushing together with Shiro, and by the time the Black Lion joined their efforts (weakly, uncertainly), Zarkon had already relented.

They returned to the hangar, and Shiro understood now: he was inside the Black Lion, staring out through her eyes as Zarkon tried to force his way in. He couldn’t move because the Black Lion had shut herself down. Her shield was up, but none of her other systems were active. She was afraid Zarkon would find some way to use her otherwise.

“Have it your way,” Zarkon spat, raising his hand in a curt gesture. The door behind him opened once more, and two figures appeared there.

Shiro wanted to be sick.

“If you refuse to accept me," Zarkon said, "then I’ll just use these _children_ you’ve attached yourself to in my stead.”

Shiro and Allura’s horror mingled into one overpowering malaise as they watched themselves walk forward, eyes glowing with Haggar’s influence. They wore Galra uniforms, silver and black, with red sigils on the breastplates. It was the same uniform Shiro had worn for three months while he played the role of loyal soldier, and the sight of it now, with the memory of Keith and Matt's still forms so fresh, made him want to scream.

“Pathetic,” Zarkon said. “Look at you—you _know_ no one else is a match for me. You _know_ you have weakened yourself in rejecting me. You need two pilots just to come _close_ to what we had ten thousand years ago. Why? What lies did Alfor tell you?”

The Black Lion rumbled her defiance, but Shiro felt the current of uncertainty beneath the surface of her anger. Her whole being was bent upon the approaching figures—Shiro and Allura still, even if they’d been turned into puppets.

_**I cannot keep them out.** _

Fear jolted through Shiro as his body bowed to Zarkon, then approached Black’s particle barrier. _What do you mean? Why not?_

 **_They are you,_ ** Black said, her voice mournful. **_If I reject you, I must reject all of you._**

Shiro and Allura would be cast out. Shiro accepted that truth, let it wash over him, then released it.

 _Do it,_ Allura said. _Sever our bond. Do not let us use you in Zarkon’s service._

_**I cannot.** _

_You have to,_ said Shiro. _Please. You’re more important than us._

 _**I cannot,** _ the Black Lion repeated. _**Without you, I cannot.** _

Shiro’s heart clenched as he saw what Black was trying to tell him. Zarkon had never surrendered his bond with the Black Lion. She had rejected him, but Zarkon had never let her refusal stop him in the past. She was afraid—afraid that Zarkon still had the strength to control her, as Haggar now controlled Shiro and Allura.

 _You called us here._ Allura’s presence thrummed with grief, and Shiro felt her emotions shake him. _You called us here for **your** sake. To help you resist. _

_**It is safer,** _ Black said. _**With you, it is safer. I am safer.** _

Shiro’s heart ached, but his resolve firmed, as did Allura's. They were scared—all three of them lost and powerless against forces that would use them to ravage and destroy. But they were not alone. They were united, three minds as one. Maybe they couldn’t keep Zarkon and Haggar out entirely, but they could fight. They were stronger together.

Shiro and Allura’s bodies touched their hands to the Black Lion’s shield, and it shattered. As it did, Allura’s mind raced toward the pedestals standing behind the pilot's seat, desperation flooding the bond. Shiro caught a fleeting glimpse of a yellow-eyed Allura standing between those pedestals, forcing the other lions to her. Claiming Voltron.

The Black Lion roared, and the pedestals retracted into the floor, panels sealing shut over them just as Shiro and Allura’s bodies reached the top of the ramp.

But Shiro didn’t have time to be relieved that one weapon, at least, would be kept out of Haggar’s hands. Allura’s body stilled at the spot where the pedestals should have been. Shiro’s curled his lip and sat down at the controls. He reached out, or Haggar reached out through him, and tugged at the part of the bond that let Shiro and Allura co-pilot their lion. Black resisted, holding the pedestals back, refusing to yield.

Power surged through her. Pain that would have made Shiro cry out if he’d still had a body. It felt like someone had reached their hand into his chest, sunk claws into his lungs, and begun to pull.

(A world lay below her, quiet and unsuspecting.)

 _**No.** _ The vice tightened. Shiro tried to twist away from it, but he was bound too closely to the lion now. There was no escape.

(A hand on her controls, on their bond.)

 _**No. Not for this.** _ The pedestals tried to rise, and the Black Lion seized them in her mind, dragging them back down, fighting the invader’s grip on her soul.

(A sudden, blinding pain. A command she could not refuse. Below her, the planet burned, and she roared in guilt and grief for what she had done.)

The Black Lion roared, but inside she was sobbing, the jagged edges of her past rubbing her raw. Shiro was swept up in that pain, his own wounds crying out in sympathy. They were both of them broken, used. Both of them weapons wielded against their will, unleashed on innocent people without the means to fight back.

Shiro sank deeper into Black’s mind, only dimly aware of Allura curling around them, a shroud of pain and sorrow. Twin pedestals rose from the floor and came to rest against Allura’s waiting hands.

 _I’m sorry._ The words came from everywhere, and from nowhere. They might have been Shiro’s. They might have been Allura’s. They might have been Black’s. Shiro thought, perhaps, it was all three of them at once.

_I’m sorry I couldn’t stop this._

* * *

Keith found Lance on the bridge, eyes red and puffy as he stared, unblinking, at the holoscreen projected above his station. It was the middle of the night, so the bridge lights were dimmed, only the Balmera crystal overhead giving off any light, and the glow of Lance’s screen seemed harsh in comparison.

Keith stopped just inside the door, shuffling his feet. Something about this felt like an intrusion—maybe the way Lance was sniffling, maybe the fact that he had his feet pulled up onto his seat, one arm wrapped around them as the other tapped at the screen.

He groaned suddenly, banging his forehead against his knee. “Goddammit.”

Glancing once more over his shoulder and contemplating a quiet retreat (No, Coran had sent him up here for a _reason_ ), Keith cleared his throat.

Lance jumped, nearly falling out of his seat as he twisted around to see who it was. At the sight of Keith, still dressed only in his black undersuit, Lance froze, and Keith felt a fresh pang at the tear tracks and dark circles framing Lance’s eyes.

“Keith?” Lance whispered. Before Keith could figure out how to answer, Lance was on his feet, leaping over the back of his chair to save the half a second it would have taken to go around. He charged forward, throwing himself at Keith, his arms squeezing so tight around Keith’s chest he thought he might pass out from lack of oxygen.

The hug lasted only an instant, though, not even long enough for Keith to grow uncomfortable at the contact, and then Lance was pulling back, tired eyes searching Keith’s face.

“Coran said you were worried,” Keith said awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. “Figured I should let you know I’m okay, especially since it sounds like you’re the whole reason I’m alive.”

Lance waved his hands, a wild gesture, and too big for the narrow space between them. Keith leaned away, but didn’t move his feet; Lance still seemed on the verge of collapse, and Keith wanted to stay close in case he _did_ finally hit a wall.

“I didn’t really do anything,” Lance said. “It was Ryner who figured out how to get you fixed up, and Coran modified the cryopod to do it. All I did was sit there.”

Keith frowned, hearing a note of… _something_ beneath Lance’s cheery demeanor. Keith wished he was better at reading people, but figuring out what others were thinking had always been something of an enigma for him, and he still hadn’t really learned how to speak Lance’s language. Not the way he he spoke Shiro's language, or Matt's.

Thinking of them sent a pang through him, and he wilted. Lance reached out for him, blue eyes sharp, and Keith looked away. His eyes fell on Lance’s holoscreen, and he suddenly realized what it was Lance had been working on.

“Eshet?”

Lance made a confused noise, then turned and followed Keith’s gaze. “Oh. Yeah...” He shrugged, rubbing his hands along his thighs, fingers fiddling with the indicator lights where his bayard was stored like he wanted to summon it. “Did you know the castle tracks our performance on the training deck?”

“It does?”

Lance nodded. “Gets some data from our armor when we’re out on missions, too, but mostly it’s the gladiator and stuff.” He turned, waving for Keith to follow him, and sat cross-legged in his chair. “Anyway, the eshet program has profiles for all of us, in case someone wants to run battle simulations for the team.”

Keith scanned the screen, his heart sinking. He must have caught Lance in the middle of a simulation, as the pieces were scattered around the field: all nine paladins, seven of them up against Shiro and Allura. Matt and Pidge led the charge against Allura, Keith and Shay against Shiro, with Ryner, Lance, and Hunk providing backup.

Allura’s marker had turned gray, a small indicator above her head proclaiming a fatal wound.

Keith felt sick.

“It’s… not looking great,” Lance said slowly. He wouldn’t look at Keith, just toyed with a thread he kept wrapping around his fingers. It looked like he'd pulled it off the frayed cuff of his jacket. “I’ve tried a hundred different approaches, but I don’t know how we’re going to pull this off. If we hold back, Shiro and Allura are going to slaughter us. If we hit hard and fast, it’s going to be _really_ hard to incapacitate them without just killing them. Ideally, we should take them both out at once, then book it out of there—because once Haggar realizes we have the upper hand, she’s going to send in reinforcements—if she doesn’t do that from the start.”

He sighed, closing out of the eshet program and slumping in his seat.

“Honestly, I can only think of two ways to do this.”

Keith frowned, sitting down on the arm of Lance’s chair. “Okay. What are they?”

“Well, we could kill Haggar,” Lance said. “I figure that’s _got_ to break her control over them.”

“Sure,” Keith said. “Except it’s _Haggar._ We’d have a tough time beating her with Shiro and Allura on our side.” Lance’s grimace said he thought the same. When he didn’t immediately offer up his other idea, Keith began to grow antsy. “So… what’s the other plan?”

Lance was silent for a long moment, his face dark, his fingers plucking at the thread like he was trying to pry it apart. Taking a deep breath, he stood, then turned to face Keith. “I need you to teach me how to use a sword.”

* * *

It was easy to lose yourself in the code.

Pidge sat inside the Green Lion, surrounded by a comforting rumble, distantly aware of Ryner outside working on Green’s shield. The part of Green that brushed up against Pidge’s mind said Ryner was tuning the shield to defend against another lion’s lasers.

But that drifted too close to things Pidge didn’t want to think about. The code was bad enough—an avalanche of fragmented commands hiding the one Pidge needed. They’d stumbled upon something that looked like a security program an hour or so ago, and they’d switched their focus to that while Green ran through the rest of the code. A semi-sentient lion ship might notice something Pidge had overlooked, they figured, and they might as well see whether or not hacking Shiro’s arm was even going to be a possibility.

They wondered what time it was. Ryner hadn’t been here at first; Pidge thought she might have started on Yellow so she could bounce ideas off Hunk, and only progressed to Green once they were finished.

Pidge probably should have taken a break by now. Should have gone to sleep. It seemed they’d been up for two or three days straight—and the fact that they couldn’t quite convince themself that was an exaggeration only made it all worse. When you couldn’t even remember how long you’d been awake, it was time to step away.

Except every time they tried to, they locked up. If it wasn’t Shiro’s look of horror when he’d woken up right at the end, it was Matt’s screams that stopped them. Or Allura, looking like a stranger as she swung her staff at Pidge’s head. (They knew full well that blow would have shattered their helmet—and probably their skull—if Hunk hadn’t jumped in front of them. Allura’s strength was nothing to scoff at.)

So they were still here, running an attack against Haggar’s security and letting Green keep them appraised of Ryner’s progress down below.

When Ryner wrapped up her work and headed for the door, Pidge tensed. There was no reason for it, no reason to feel the silence suddenly wrap itself around their throat, but they felt Ryner’s absence like a wound, and the computer screen in front of them went out of focus. They didn't want to be alone.

It was stupid, this was stupid, _they_ were stupid, and everyone was going to die because Pidge _wasn’t smart enough to fix this._

Green was roaring, a vibration in the air that rattled Pidge’s head but didn’t reach their ears. They bit at the loose pieces of skin where their lips were chapping, wincing as the skin pulled free and began to bleed, the sharp taste curdling their stomach.

Someone touched their shoulder.

Pidge jumped, their mind on overdrive, everything around them too bright and too close. The hand pulled back, and Ryner knelt beside them, concern radiating through the bond. Green echoed it, and Pidge shrank further down. They didn’t want anyone to worry about them. They didn’t _want_ to be like this. To be weak. To be stupid.

_Dad would have been able to figure this out._

It had been so long since they’d thought of him—the last missing member of the Kerberos crew. All their digging had turned up no hint to where he’d been sent when he was separated from Matt and Shiro. No sign to say he was even still alive.

Pidge wished he were here now.

“Pidge,” Ryner said. “Pidge, can you tell me what’s wrong?”

It was too much. All of it. The war, and their dad’s disappearance, and Matt’s injuries, and Shiro and Allura being taken. Pidge wanted to make it all right, but it was too big a problem, all the threads tangled together, and they no longer knew where to start.

A sigh. Pidge cringed. They hadn’t meant to disappoint Ryner. They opened their mouth to apologize, but the only sound that made it out was a shuddering, hiccuping breath that didn’t do anyone any good.

Ryner stood, and for an instant Pidge thought she was leaving again—but she was only crossing the cockpit to sit in the pilot's seat. Usually that was where Pidge sat, but Ryner’s seat had most of the computers, and that was where Pidge had needed to go to upload the code to Green. As soon as Ryner sat down, Pidge felt the change. She’d reached out to the Green Lion, who had responded at once, their minds intertwining like vines of creeping ivy. The line between the two of them blurred, then smoothed over, and they reached out toward Pidge—carefully, slowly. An invitation, not an intrusion.

“Would this be easier?” Ryner asked.

With anyone else, the answer would have been no. With anyone else—except, perhaps, Matt—Pidge would have shied away. They liked their privacy, and they hated the mind-meld with a passion that hadn’t faded over the months they’d been a paladin. They’d accepted it as a necessary evil, accepted that it helped the others prepare to form Voltron (though to Pidge, Voltron and the mind-meld were nothing alike). But they always had to take time to prepare themself for a mind-meld session.

They were not prepared now.

But this was Green, and this was Ryner, and the two of them already knew Pidge better than most of the others. They’d shared a mind before, more intimately than they shared a mind with the other paladins as part of Voltron. This was safe. This was familiar.

Cautiously, Pidge reached out toward the bond, letting themself be wrapped up in Ryner’s mind. She was warm and comforting, sympathetic but not overbearing, like one of their dad’s hugs. A question hovered just beyond words, a suggestion Pidge could choose to ignore.

 _I should be able to **do** this, _ Pidge thought, knowing Ryner would hear the words and see everything else that was tangled around them. The code, the arm, the search for their dad, and a dozen other projects that had been left unfinished as more urgent business arose.

Pidge was supposed to fix problems, not abandon them.

 _Some problems don’t have a solution,_ Ryner told them. _Sometimes you just need to find a new approach._

 _That’s what I’ve been trying to do,_ Pidge protested. All their work on the code spilled out of them. Hundreds of hours of staring at the computer, analyzing the code line by line, typing up analyses as they tried to untangle the secrets that just didn’t want to give themselves up.

_**Wrong.** _

The Green Lion’s voice startled Pidge’s mind into silence for all of two seconds before the shame began to creep back in.

 _**Problem is wrong,**_  Green said before Pidge had time to travel far down that path. They frowned, glancing over at Ryner. She seemed just as confused as Pidge, which was a comfort. How could the _problem_ be wrong?

The Green Lion rumbled, something that felt like a huff, even if it didn’t sound like one. Words had never been easy for her, Pidge knew; she spoke through actions, and through code, and through something that had always somehow reminded Pidge of smells. She presented a challenge, and Pidge solved it. In that way, they came to understand each other.

That was not something either of them could do now, though, and it frustrated Green as much as it did Pidge. Ryner soothed them both, her mind already tugging at the knot of impressionistic signals Green had provided with her statement.

 _The problem is wrong…_ Ryner began, and Pidge smelled burning dust—a computer overworking itself. Strings of code flashed before their eyes. _The code. The code is wrong._

Pidge frowned, and the air filled with the scent of lightning, that ozone crackle that reminded Pidge of the LOKI… and of Haggar. Realization thudded through them, stealing the breath from their lungs. _The magic,_ they said. _The override is in the magic._

 **_Problem is wrong,_ ** Green said by way of affirmation. **_No solution._ **

If not for the bond and the peace it brought, Pidge thought they might have burst into tears. They’d thrown themself into this code, desperate to find the answer. _Certain_ there was an answer to find. Lance was counting on them to bring Shiro back. _Are you sure?_ they asked. _There could be--_

_**No solution. Can paladin hack lion bond? Can paladin make not-paladin?** _

Pidge smelled Green’s disdain, but they pursed their lips. _I’ve hacked the Red Lion before. Back when Keith was still trying to hide his face. I hacked his cameras._

Green rumbled at the reminder, and Pidge felt Ryner’s surprise. There were very few things on which Pidge and Green disagreed—but the fact that Pidge had hacked another lion remained their biggest sticking point.

_**Hacked lion. Not lion bond.** _

_Wait._ Ryner’s mind moved quicker, her unease bleeding across to Pidge. _You can’t hack a paladin’s bond with their lion—not with computers, not with magic. It’s impossible. That’s what you’re saying, right?_

 _**Impossible,**_ the Green Lion confirmed. Pidge smelled metal and blood and ozone, and they began to see how it all fit together. Haggar hadn't simply flipped a switch in Shiro to take him over; she'd forged a bond with him, like a corrupted version of the paladin bond. The arm tied him to her somehow, but the bond itself was something that couldn't be severed with a bit of clever coding.

 _Right,_ said Ryner. _But then... how did Haggar get at Allura and the Black Lion? They don't have Shiro's cybernetic to link them to Haggar.  
_

Pidge frowned. How had Haggar taken them? _Because they were connected. But…_

Oh.

 _Allura_ had established that connection. Haggar couldn’t establish those connections at a whim, but she could hitch a ride on ones that already existed.

 _Ryner,_ Pidge thought. _I think Hunk was right about Shiro and Allura's telepathy. I think Haggar's going to use it against us.  
_

A flash of horror from Ryner, quickly displaced by a firm resolve. _Then we're just going to have to figure out a way to counter it._

* * *

Hunk took half of his last Ativan before heading up to meet Shay on the training deck.

Things had been going fine (fine enough) while he was working on Yellow with Ryner. Yellow’s presence was calming, and Ryner was kind of turning into the team mom, and between the two of them they’d managed to scale Hunk’s anxiety back from _end of the world_ to _please_ _let this just be a bad dream._

Figuring out ways to improve the lions’ defenses helped, too. That was a clear problem with a well-defined solution. He could focus on the work instead of on all his other worries, and for a couple hours he felt something approaching calm.

That was over now, of course. Yellow was ready for battle, or at least as ready as they could make her under the circumstances. Ryner was off to mod Green, but she’d told Hunk to check in with Shay and meet her at the Blue Lion in a couple of hours.

He’d lingered with Yellow until Ryner was gone, knowing he was going to break down as soon as he stepped away. Even ready for the wave of anxiety, though, it was too much. His heartbeat sped up, his chest grew tight with worry. He kept seeing Allura, swinging for Pidge’s head with no care in the world that she could kill them.

 _Pidge could have died. Shay could have died. Keith and Matt almost_ did _die._

Why was this happening? Why couldn’t Hunk just keep his friends safe?

Underlying the anxiety was guilt, guilt so deep and dark it hurt to look at it too closely—so Hunk buried it deeper and all but ran to the training deck. He needed another problem to solve. He needed another task. Sparring with Shay might be exactly what he needed.

He started to feel the Ativan as he neared the training deck, and he could tell it was only a half dose. He still felt like his skin didn’t fit right, like the world had tilted on its axis. He could breathe, though he was panting far sooner than he should have been after he broke into a jog, his heartbeat a little quicker than normal. He almost wished he’d taken the whole pill, except that he knew he was going to need something when they finally went after Shiro and Allura again. The last run had been awful, and this time there would be no room for the team to be anything less than their very best.

Maybe he shouldn’t have taken anything, then. This—this half-calm, a kind of suspended panic attack—didn’t do him any good. (Except he knew it was better than it could have been, and he honestly wasn’t sure he could have made himself leave the Yellow Lion without _something_ to dull the knife-edge of anxiety trying to cut him in two.)

Shay was still on the training deck when he arrived, which surprised Hunk more than it should have. It was late, and Shay had every reason to have called it a night. As hard as they’d all been pushing themselves, they would need at least a few hours of sleep before they launched another rescue attempt.

But there Shay was, huddled behind her shield as the gladiator approached. Hunk stopped just inside the door to watch. When they’d parted ways, she’d assured him she would be fine. Hunk had to admit he’d been skeptical, since she’d only done basic self-defense training with Allura before this. Shay wasn’t a soldier—she’d always maintained that, and Hunk had defended her decision not to face the gladiator every step of the way.

Well, she was facing it now. But she wasn’t fighting. Hunk watched as the Gladiator hammered at Shay’s shield with its blade—a _blade_ , not a staff, which meant this was at least a level five. _Why_ was she up against a level five? It had only been a few hours!

Shay flinched as the sword struck her shield, but she didn’t yield. All she did was brace her shoulder against the back of the shield and spread her feet a little wider, tensing in the instant before the gladiator struck again, a string of slashes that barely scratched the surface of the shield.

Shay squeezed her eyes shut, turning her face away from the next attack, so she didn’t see the gladiator shift to come at her from another angle.

Hunk’s heart thundered in his ears, and he reached instinctively for his bayard, only to meet resistance as he remembered it was in Shay’s hands. She gave a start, opening her eyes to gape at the shield, then noticed the gladiator.

“End training sequence!” Hunk cried as Shay stumbled back, her eyes open wide with fear.

The gladiator froze, its sword vanishing, but Shay continued to backpedal, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps. She tripped over her own feet and went down, bayard reverting to its inactive form and skidding away.

“Shay!”

Hunk raced toward her, feeling as though he hadn’t taken an Ativan at all. He slid the last few feet on his knees, reaching out to help her up.

Shay screamed as his hands touched her, flailing her limbs as she propelled herself back away from Hunk. She only stopped when her back hit the wall, and then she went as still as the gladiator, staring at Hunk in horror as she realized where she was and what was happening.

Her face crumpled all at once, tears welling up behind her eyes in the instant before she buried her face in her knees, her hands coming up to press against the side of her head.

“Vex _,_ ” she whispered. “ _Vex!_ I—I am sorry, Hunk, I am so sorry—I—”

“Shh.” Hunk held up his hands, his heart still pounding, and inched closer to Shay. He didn’t try to touch her again, just circled around until he was sitting beside her, his back against the wall. He left several inches between them, even though what he really wanted to do was hold her until she stopped shaking. He wished she didn’t look so small. “It’s okay, Shay.”

“It is _not_ ,” she hissed. He could hear the tears in her wavering voice, but she held her sobs back, only curling more tightly in on herself. “It is _not_ okay.”

Hunk breathed in a gasp, her words too sharp for the kind, steady Shay he knew. “What happened?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”

One of Shay’s hands moved as though she meant to grab at her shoulder. Hunk couldn’t see any wounds there, but he’d faced a level five gladiator. They were brutal, and Hunk didn't like to face them without Shiro or Allura as backup. The one time he'd tried to solo it, he'd ended the match with cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder—and he’d only fought for a few minutes. How long had this match gone on before Hunk showed up?

“I am unharmed.” Shay’s voice dared him to argue, but he wasn’t here for a fight, so he held up his hands in surrender. This seemed to catch Shay off guard, and she peered up at him between her fingers, eyes wet. “I _am._ ”

“I believe you,” Hunk lied. Wounds could wait. There was something bigger going on here, and Hunk couldn’t just stand aside while Shay fell apart on the training room floor. “What level was that gladiator at?”

Shay turned her head aside. “I must prepare myself to face Shiro,” she said, as if that was an answer.

Well, it _was_ , in a sense. Hunk glanced at the robot and shuddered. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have come up here first.”

“You had your own duty,” Shay said, her voice growing sharp on the last word. Seeming to catch herself, she turned her face back into her knees and curled her arms around her head protectively. “The Yellow Lion should not have chosen me.”

“ _What?_ ” Hunk yelped. “Shay, what are you talking about? You’re an amazing paladin! You and Yellow are, like, _scary_ close—I’ll never be able to fly her like you do. Plus you’re a healer—and look at your shield! You did more than _any_ of us in that last fight. You _broke Haggar’s control_ over Shiro.”

“ _That is the problem, Hunk._ ”

Hunk had been prepared to continue listing Shay’s accomplishments indefinitely (Altea knew there were a million of them), but her words stopped him—not because of their force, but because they came as a whisper on the verge of cracking.

He leaned toward her, catching himself just before he brushed up against her, and bit his lip. “You’re upset because you freed Shiro, and he still got taken again?” Hunk asked. “That was our fault, not yours.” Not that he could blame her for feeling that way. After all, Hunk was much the same. He’d figured out the secret of how Haggar was tracking Shiro—at least, he thought he had. He’d made Shiro think he was safe, and then...

“No,” Shay said, and Hunk set aside his own issues for now. “I… I know now I have the ability to free Shiro. It is just that… I think I lack the courage.”

Hunk shook his head. “Lack the courage? Shay, you stood up to Shiro on your own, which is more than the rest of us managed. How can you say you lack the courage?”

Shay’s shoulders rose. “I stood because it was that or leave Matt to die. I had no time to be afraid.” She looked up at the deactivated gladiator, her face pulled tight with the tears she didn’t want to shed. “In this… In this, I have no such reason. You ask me to be a soldier, but… I am _not_.”

“Shay…” Hunk bit down on a curse, stretching out a hand toward her—slowly, so he could see if she didn’t want to be touched. She said nothing, though, and relaxed a little as he rubbed her arm. “Shay, I’m sorry. I didn’t think—Lance was just—”

“I know.” Shay sighed, wrapping her arms around her knees. “We all wish to save Shiro and Allura, and I am the best chance we have. This is something I must do… But I _cannot._ ”

Hunk thought of the Shay he’d seen in the last battle, standing against Shiro like an honest-to-god hero. She was so much more than she gave herself credit for; a better paladin than any of them, as far as Hunk was concerned. She was kind and brave and loyal. She saved lives, not because she was a paladin but simply because she was _Shay_ , and she couldn’t stand to see anyone suffer.

But now wasn’t the time to tell Shay what she could be. Shifting his hand to Shay’s back, Hunk said, “You don’t have to do this.”

Shay looked up at him, surprised. “But… Shiro’s arm…”

“Is tough,” Hunk said. “And the form your bayard took is perfect for this fight—but there’s no reason you have to be the one to use it. I can get it to take on a bunch of different forms, and Matt can switch between his gun and his sword. Heck, Lance’s bayard gave him a grenade launcher when he really needed it.” He paused, focusing on the bayard laying on the ground across the room until it returned to storage in his armor and then appeared in his hand. “How about instead of trying to teach you to fight, we teach me to summon a shield like yours?”

He turned to see what Shay thought of the idea, only to find himself being engulfed in her arms. She shook with the sobs she’d been fighting against all this time, her face pressed against the curve of his neck. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “I am so sorry.”

“Hey. _Hey._ ” He returned her hug, scowling at the far wall as he held her. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for.”

“But I do,” she said. “I do not want to fight.”

Hunk squeezed her tighter. “I know. You want to end the violence, not perpetuate it. That’s one of the things I love about you.”

For a moment, she seemed to stop breathing, and Hunk suddenly realized what he’d said. He sat, frozen, refusing to take it back, until Shay relaxed.

“Thank you, Hunk,” she said. “But I think, this time, I am wrong. Sometimes it is necessary to fight. Sometimes standing aside is, itself, a wrong.” Taking a deep breath, she pulled away from him, plucking the bayard from his loose grip. It flashed, taking on the form of a shield. “Will you help me?”

Hunk looked up at her, tears on her face, hand shaking as it held the shield—but standing firm. He didn’t think he’d ever seen someone so beautiful before.

He let her pull him to his feet, smiling proudly. “Of course I’ll help,” he said. “I’m always here for you, Shay, whatever you need.”

She leaned forward as he regained his balance, pressing her nose and forehead against his. Hunk inhaled on instinct, tears following soon after. The gesture reminded him of a _honi_ —of home _._ Of the islands. Of his mothers running to greet him when he came home on break from the Garrison, of his uncle's rare visits that came with a burst of excitement and color and this one moment of stillness. The _honi_ was a greeting, a kiss, a gesture of affection, an exchange of breath and of _self_. It was so much more than Hunk knew how to say, so much more than anything he’d felt since leaving home, and it left him breathless.

From the flushed heat of Shay’s skin against his, and the warm light in her eyes as she pulled back, he knew it meant just as much to her.

“You are here,” she whispered, her eyes shining with fresh tears. “You are always here when I need you. That is one of the things I love about you.”

* * *

Lance cried out as Keith’s attack tore the sword out of his hands— _again._ He stumbled back, breathing hard, and bit down on the urge to swear. Swearing hadn’t gotten him anywhere so far, and breathing was far more important.

Still, he growled as he went to retrieve his bayard. They were in one of the smaller training rooms, as Hunk and Shay were sparring in the main room. Or had been, when Keith and Lance had started. It had been close to two hours now—the first forty-five minutes of which had been spent just trying to make Lance’s bayard turn into a sword. And stay that way past the first attack.

Keith backed off, watching Lance warily. He was a little short of breath by now, which was better than the first hour, when he’d knocked Lance around without a care in the world.

“You’re getting better?” Keith said, as if he’d read Lance’s mind.

Lance snorted. “Is that a question, or a lie?”

Keith pursed his lips. “You _are._ You don’t seriously expect to learn the sword in one night, do you?”

“I don’t know, Keith, would _you_ rather--” Lance faltered, cursing. Even just thinking about it—the one shot they had, the one plan he could think of that didn’t wind up with anyone dead—made him sick. A glance at Keith told him the red paladin was no better off. Lance straightened, wrestling his bayard into the sabre form it had finally adopted for him. “Just shut up and come at me again.”

Keith sighed, but fell back into stance. Lance followed suit a little less gracefully, readying himself for another beating. He was going to need a stay in the cryopods at this rate.

The door hissed opened before they could begin, and Keith straightened so fast Lance was afraid he’d give himself whiplash. Curious, Lance turned, blinking at the sight of not only Coran, but the Altean boy he’d found on Haggar’s ship, who hardly waited until Lance had caught sight of him before dashing forward and throwing his arms around Lance’s waist.

Lance’s fatigue fled him in an instant, and he abandoned his bayard in favor of grabbing onto the boy, struggling to hold them both up as he fought to regain his balance. “Hey!" Lance cried, a smile splitting his face. "You’re awake!”

“Indeed he is,” Coran said, beaming down at the boy. “Lance, meet Wyn. Wyn, Lance and Keith, two of the paladins.” Wyn pulled away from Lance, leaning to one side to peer around him at Keith.

Keith made an uncertain sound. “Should… I go?”

“You’re fine, Red Two,” Coran said, waving a hand.

“Are you from New Altea, too?” Wyn asked.

Keith stared at him, ears twitching. “New Altea? I’ve never been there. But…” He glanced up at Lance, frowning. “I’ve heard my mom might have had something to do with them. Her name was Keena.”

Wyn pursed his lips, then shook his head. “Don’t know her.”

Though he tried to hide his disappointment, Lance saw the slump of Keith’s shoulders at the answer. So did Wyn, if his frown was any indication. He glanced up at Lance, then backed up a few steps. “Coran was showing me around the castle.”

“Starting to, at any rate.” Coran pulled his ticker out of his pocket, shook it, then rubbed at his eyes. “But it’s getting late. You want me to walk you back to your room?”

Wyn shook his head. “I remember where it is.”

Coran narrowed his eyes. “You aren’t going to wander off in search of Maka and that lot, are you?”

“Of course not,” Wyn said, and Lance had seen (and told) enough lies to adults to see the mischief in the way Wyn rose up on his toes, his hands tucked behind his back. That he was smiling at all was enough to cut through the tension that had been plaguing Lance all day. That he apparently was feeling good enough to sneak out to play with the Galra kids brought actual tears to Lance’s eyes.

Coran remained firm for all of five seconds before he relented, shooing Wyn off with an admonition to get some sleep. “Tomorrow’s going to come early!”

Wyn called out a vague answer, and then he was gone. Lance was honestly surprised he kept himself to a walk until he was out of sight.

“He’s okay,” Lance breathed, and sat down hard against the wall. He’d been so scared, after how timid Wyn had been at first. Scared Haggar had done something so terrible to him that he’d never recover. Scared, because every time Lance looked at Wyn he thought of Mateo. “He’s okay.”

“He will be,” Coran said, taking a seat beside him. “He’s a strong one, that boy. Already wants to start going out on missions with you paladins, you know.”

Lance looked up, horrified. “Absolutely not.”

Chuckling, Coran patted his shoulder. “I told him I’d teach him to fly the castle-ship, but he’d have to take up a post on the bridge with me during battle. Should keep him distracted for a little while.”

“I guess that’s _better_ ,” Lance muttered. With a sigh, he stretched his sore legs out in front of him. The hour of training was starting to catch up to him, and he was almost ready for bed—except that he still had work to do if he was going to be ready for tomorrow. (It _would_ be tomorrow; they couldn’t wait any longer than that.)

“So… what are you two doing in here?” Coran asked.

Lance glanced up at Keith, who hovered awkwardly nearby, still holding his sword, though he’d at least remembered to power it down while Wyn was here. “Practicing,” Lance said evasively.

Keith, of course, was having none of that. “Lance asked me to teach him swordplay.”

“Swordplay.” Coran’s eyebrows shot up, and he glanced at Lance expectantly. “Whatever would you want that for?”

“We need more melee fighters,” Lance said before Keith could jump in with the truth. The _full_ truth, anyway; Lance wasn’t exactly lying. “Shiro and Allura are half our front line, and now we’re down to Keith—and Matt if he’s better in time, which we can’t count on. We’re going to get crushed if there’s no one to give us room to shoot.”

Coran scratched his chin. “Have you considered an ambush? I don’t see how there’s any need for close-quarters combat at all.”

Lance grimaced. “Yeah, except how are we supposed to take them down without killing them? It takes a lot more than one shot to bust through good quality armor, unless you want me to aim for the face, which I wouldn’t recommend.” He caught his bleak tone and shook himself. “Anyway, that still risks druids swooping in to grab them again. We _need_ to be close.”

“And you’re sure a sword’s your best bet?” Coran asked.

Lance had been expecting more of an argument on the strategic front, so the sudden shift in topic left him momentarily speechless. He glanced at Keith. “I’ve at least got someone to teach me the sword.”

Coran hummed thoughtfully. “And what does your bayard think of that?”

“My… bayard?”

“Yes.” Coran tapped Lance’s leg. “The bayard is tied to your Quintessence, but it’s made from a small piece of the Blue Lion. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it sentient, but if it’s trying to tell you something, it might be a good idea to listen.”

Lance frowned, summoning his bayard. “Well, I mean, it’s kinda fighting me on the sword thing, but what else am I supposed to do? Just try every melee weapon I can think of?”

“Try not thinking of one at all,” Coran suggested. “Visualize the situation you need the weapon for, and see what it gives you.”

Of course. Lance hadn’t asked for a grenade launcher, after all. He’d just wanted something to take out all the Haggar clones at once. He formed an image in his head, all the paladins going up against Shiro and Allura, Lance charging in--

The bayard flashed, and Lance nearly impaled himself on a long, slender shaft. Yelping, he dropped the bayard and dove aside. The butt of the shaft struck the wall behind him, and the weapon rebounded, skittering out across the floor. It was a polearm, easily eight feet long from end to end, the last foot and a half taken up by a single-edged blade.

Lance’s eyes widened at the sight, and he grinned. “Ooh, look at that. A lance for Lance.”

“More of a glaive, I think,” Coran said, looking impressed. “A fine weapon. I have a bit of training with them myself.”

Lance’s smile faltered. “No, I mean… because my name is Lance?”

Coran glanced at him, and then up at Keith, who just shrugged.

“It’s a _joke_?” Lance said. “Fine, so it’s not my best joke ever, but...”

“Ohhh.” Keith nodded like he’d just figured out the answer to Final Jeopardy. “Your name means _lance_ in Earthian.”

Lance gaped at him, stammering through a few incredulous responses before settling on, “The language is called _English_. And my name doesn’t _mean_ ‘lance.’ It _is_ Lance!”

“Wait. You’re named after a weapon?” Keith looked him up and down, lips twitching. “Seriously?”

Lance scrambled to his feet, scowling. “Don’t give me that attitude, fuzzbutt. It’s called a nickname. Ever heard of ‘em?”

Keith just laughed.

Offended, Lance turned to Coran for support, but he seemed just as amused as Keith. Lance squawked in protest, and Coran held up his hands.

“All right, all right,” he said. “Names aside, I _do_ know how to fight with most polearms, glaive included. I could show you the basics if you like?”

Lance grumbled for a while longer. In retrospect, it made a certain amount of sense that his name wouldn’t translate with the rest of his words. His sister was still Luz after all; he only called her his little Light when she was being particularly adorable.

Still, he couldn’t help being offended that his entire repertoire of lance puns had just been taken off the table.

“Yeah,” he finally said, drawing out the word as he retrieved his glaive and took his place at the center of the small training room. “That’s probably a good idea.”

Coran pressed a hidden button on the wall—there seemed to be a lot of those in the castle—and a rack of polearms descended from the ceiling. Coran chose one, then sent the rack back up. He turned to Keith. “Don’t feel like you have to stay. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind catching a quick nap?”

“Nah.” Keith put his sword away, then went to lean against the wall by the door, crossing his arms. “I wouldn’t miss this for the universe.”

* * *

The paladins did all, eventually make it to their rooms, though it took some doing on Coran’s part. He worked Lance till the boy's eyes started to droop, then sent Keith to help him to his room, making Keith promise he would go to sleep, too, once Lance was squared away.

Hunk and Shay were still in the main training room by the time Coran shuttled his first two charges off. They’d stopped training at some point and sat against the wall, shoulder to shoulder, water pouches forgotten in their hands. They’d already begun to doze, though both insisted they were fine.

“Need to...” Hunk dissolved into a yawn, the rest of his sentence unintelligible. Coran helped him to his feet as he tried again. “Need to find Allura’s signature in the castle thing. Computer. Castle computer.”

Coran arched an eyebrow, reaching out to steady Hunk as he staggered. “Whatever for?”

“T’track her,” Hunk mumbled. “Same way Haggar tracked Shiro. Figured we have it somewhere, if the castle knows who she is.”

He seemed to only be hitting about half the points he wanted to make, but Coran pieced together the gist of it. “I’ll pull up Allura’s Quintessential signature before I go to bed,” he said. “You just focus on getting back to your room, all right you two?”

Shay mumbled an agreement, and when Hunk blearily began to protest, she simply tossed him over her shoulder and carried him from the room.

Smiling, Coran watched them go, then continued on his hunt. Pidge and Ryner weren’t in the Green Lion’s bay, so Coran stopped by the pod room to check on Matt—still sleeping, the Quintessence drain paused for the night, but his condition already much improved—then headed up to the paladin quarters. The four paladins he’d shooed this way were, in fact, in their rooms, which was something of a surprise.

Even more surprising, he caught Ryner emerging from Pidge’s room.

“They’re actually _sleeping?_ ” Coran asked in a whisper as Ryner shut the door.

She chuckled. “Shocking, I know. Best not to jinx it.”

With that, all the paladins were accounted for. Coran stopped at the second door from the end, next to his own, to make sure Wyn had found his way back. He had, and was even sleeping, Maka curled up at the foot of the bed, Wyn sprawled beside him. A deck of Altean playing cards sat between them, half the stack spilled onto the floor.

Smiling, Coran gathered up the cards and set them on the nightstand, then retrieved two blankets from the closet to cover the boys.

After that, he still had work of his own to take care of: letting the other Galra know where Maka was, starting a scan for Allura’s signature for Hunk, going back for one last scan of Matt. His Quintessence levels had risen since Coran had shut off the drain, but a quick analysis of the rate of intake let him set the system to drain only as much Quintessence as Matt took in, with an emergency shutoff if the levels dropped below their present state.

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it should get him through the night. The crystal on his face had already begun to flake off in places, looking more like dead skin than Balmera crystal. Curious.

Coran didn’t dare venture far from the pods until Matt was fully healed, so he raised a cot from the floor storage and curled up, promising himself he was only going to rest his eyes.

He woke some hours later to an alarm blaring.

Stumbling to the nearest computer station, Coran rubbed the sleep from his eyes and searched for the source. There were two alerts flashing at him, and either one would have been enough to shock him into wakefulness. The castle had located Allura's Quintessence, and the Arusian king had triggered the emergency signal Allura had left with him some months before.

Coran pulled up the tracking program, horror gathering in his bones. He knew, even before he read the coordinates, what he would find.

Arus was under attack from the Black Lion.


	22. Eye for an Eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Shiro and Allura's bodies are once more under Haggar's control, but their minds have found shelter inside Black. They saw her memories of Zarkon and helped her keep him out when he came to try to reclaim her, but were unable to stop their own mind-controlled bodies from accessing their bond.
> 
> Meanwhile the other paladins are preparing for another rescue attempt. Lance trained with Coran in the use of a glaive, Hunk and Shay had a conversation about violence and courage, and Pidge and Ryner realized they've been chasing a dead end with trying to hack Shiro's arm--but they have a new problem. Haggar may be able to use Shiro and Allura's bond with the Black Lion to influence the other paladins. Matt's still in the cryopod, but everyone else finally managed to find sleep--only to wake to news of an attack by the Black Lion on the planet Arus.

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry #552  
>  Dated two months before the return of Voltron**
> 
> The loss of the Champion was a significant blow to our progress, particularly as we had no time to finalize many of the functions planned for his cybernetic arm. One trial was completed, however: the use of the override chip,* by way of which the subject can be controlled much like a ship on autopilot. It retains some autonomy, but we are able to set goals and behavioral parameters manually.
> 
> We believe that a similar principle can be applied to other test subjects. By equipping the robeast pilots with an override, we should be able to subdue rebellious test subjects and focus those too feral to act on anything more than base instincts.
> 
> Further tests are needed to determine which subjects will respond to an override, as well as the best way to install it.

*Pidge’s note: I’m starting to think there’s something faulty with this translation. They keep talking about the override chip like it’s a physical thing, but Green said Haggar’s control came from some kind of bond, and… I don’t know. I don’t know.

I really wish I’d thought to ask these questions sooner.

* * *

Keith was the first to reach his lion and launch, but only because Lance was still aching from last night’s training. His head throbbed, his arms felt like they were going to fall off, and he tried not to think about the lines of pain where his legs were supposed to be.

In retrospect, overworking himself in an effort to learn a new weapon less than half a day before battle had _not_ been the brightest idea he’d ever had.

He still couldn’t bring himself to regret it. They had very few options in this fight; Lance could deal with a little bit of pain to open up one more. Besides, now that he was awake enough for the reality of the situation to crash down on him, a handful of sore muscles seemed like a raindrop in a stormy sea.

The Black Lion was here. On Arus. Attacking.

Blue launched with a roar, and Lance found himself looking down at a familiar planet. It still reminded him of Earth, even after all the other places he’d gone. Not just the green land and the wide swaths of water, either. It was something about the way the light of the distant star caught the atmosphere, something about the shape of the continents.

This wasn’t Earth, but it was close enough to sting—especially when a blue laser flashed across the void of space, lit up the atmosphere with refracted light, and took a city-sized chunk out of the land below.

Keith screamed, his voice raw with emotion in Lance’s ear, and charged toward the source of the attack. A fireball blossomed in the darkness, vanishing nearly as quickly as it had come. Lance wheeled Blue toward the lights, pushing her as fast as she could go.

The Black and Red Lions circled each other, lasers flashing. Black pulled Red close with her tractor beam, and Red thrashed away, her claws kicking up sparks as they fought for purchase on Black’s armored chest.

“Keith!” Lance snapped. “Calm down!”

“ _You calm down!”_ Keith snarled. “That’s Shiro and Allura in there, Lance. She’s making them attack an innocent planet!”

Lance rolled aside as Black took a shot at him, responding with a wave of ice that only slowed the other lion for a few seconds. “Yeah? Well you’ve succeeded in attracting Haggar’s attention. Congratulations. Now try not to get yourself killed before the others even get here?”

A growl was his only answer, but Keith had backed off, attacking with fire and lasers whenever Black’s attention was on Lance, focusing on evasion when it became necessary.

The Red Lion was slower than usual—noticeably so. She wasn’t really _slow_ ; she could still probably fly circles around Blue, was still an even match for the Black Lion. But with only one pilot, she had to hold back. Could Keith feel it, Lance wondered? Could he feel his reflexes lagging behind what they were when he was with Matt? Was that part of why he fought with so much desperation?

It was only a minute or two before the other two lions dove into the fray. Yellow arrived with a roar, slamming bodily into the Black Lion as she tried to turn Lance into a white-hot fusion of flesh and metal.

“Nice timing, guys,” Lance said, gunning it to put more space between him and Black. She wasn’t the Head of Voltron for nothing—she was bigger than all the lions, faster than anyone but Red, with better shields than anyone but Yellow. Lance had never taken the time to notice the relative strengths of all the lions’ weapons, but he had a feeling Black would be near the top of that list, too.

“Sorry we’re late,” Pidge said. “Got held up by the peanut gallery.”

Lance spun Blue around so he had a glimpse of the area around the castle-ship. Haggar’s command ship was there, dwarfing the castle, a fleet of support ships already thick in the air. Lance wondered how he hadn’t noticed them when he launched. Maybe they’d been waiting for the paladins to commit to the battle before they flanked them.

“It’s fine,” he said, turning his mind back to the battle at hand. Mid-attack wasn’t exactly an ideal time to talk strategy, but there had been no chance for a briefing back on the castle. He opened his mouth, then hesitated. “Pidge, what are the odds Haggar can hear us all over the comms channel?”

There was a brief pause, then a torrent of curses and the whisper of fingers flying across a digital keyboard. “I should’ve caught that,” they muttered.

Lance’s next attack encased Black’s tail in ice, which gave Yellow a chance to clear out, Hunk calling his thanks over the comms. “It’s fine, Pidge. Can you deal with it?”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” they asked, sounding offended. “Of course I can deal with—ha-ha! Got it. We should be golden now.”

“Great. Because--”

“Well,” Pidge drew the word out, their gaze skittering aside as Green—under Ryner’s control, apparently, which was something of a change for the green paladins—entered the fray. “I say ‘golden…’”

“What?” Hunk asked, voice sounding like it wanted to pitch higher but couldn’t quite work up the energy. Shay sat at the controls beside him, apparently too focused on flying to react. “What are you saying Pidge? Is something wrong? Can they hack the comms? You can hack the comms.”

Pidge scoffed. “Okay, but that’s _me._ Shiro and Allura aren’t tech geniuses, and I doubt Haggar knows that much about the lions’ systems.”

Yelping as Black took another pot shot at Yellow, Hunk shook his head. “I dunno, Pidge, that doesn’t sound very reassuring.”

“We’ve got bigger problems to worry about,” Pidge snapped. “You were right. If Haggar’s taken over the bond like Ryner and I think she has...” They drew in a deep breath, tension hanging over the silence like an oncoming storm. “There’s a good chance Haggar can use their pseudo-telepathy thing to influence _us_.”

Lance went rigid, his grip on the controls going momentarily slack as the implications hit him. Shiro and Allura’s telepathy was a powerful tool. It let them see where the others were, hear some of what they were thinking, nudge them along with silent suggestion. By now, they were all so used to it that they responded without a second thought.

In a moment of blind panic, Lance began to replay the battle in his head. Had Shiro and Allura already been taking advantage of the mental link? Had they nudged him into anything he’d done? Maybe this was another distraction, and there was a second attack force none of them had noticed. Maybe--

A laser caught Blue in the chest, and Lance grunted as he was thrown against his restraints.

“Be calm,” Ryner said evenly. There was an edge behind her voice, something that reminded Lance a little of Allura. “They cannot take control of you through the link, or they would have already done so. We only mention it so you can all be aware. Mind your thoughts. Make sure you aren’t acting at their prodding before you decide to improvise.”

Lance latched onto Ryner’s words, pouring his panic into Blue. He needed to breathe. Needed to think. “Be careful what you say, too,” he said. “Even with the comms secure, they can hear what we’re saying if they concentrate.”

Pidge grunted. “Yeah. I’m hoping Haggar won’t be able to use the link as effectively as the real Shiro and Allura, but we shouldn’t count on that.”

Which meant Lance wasn’t going to be able to tell the others his plan unless he wanted to tip Haggar off, too. Great. “Okay. Okay. So the first thing to do is get them out of the lion. Can’t read our minds without Black.”

Pidge met his eyes across the comms, their gaze unusually intense. “Yeah,” they said. “We’ll follow your lead.”

Lance felt as though he’d gotten caught in one of Blue’s ice blasts. Follow _his_ lead? Hunk and Shay were already voicing their agreement. Keith arched an eyebrow, but nodded, his lips quirking into a smile. Okay then. Lance supposed he’d brought this on himself when he took charge yesterday.

But how to take out a lion? Hunk and Ryner were going to try to outfit them with something that could give their lions and advantage in this fight, but Lance didn’t know how much success they’d had, or whether they’d had time to get to all the lions.

Then again, he wasn’t sure that was going to be the deciding factor here. He thought again of how Pidge and Ryner had switched spots. Pidge almost always flew Green, while Ryner manned the roughly ten thousand mods the pair of them had installed. If they’d picked today, of all days, to switch, there had to be a reason.

Pidge couldn’t risk telling Lance, of course. Not with the chance that Shiro and Allura were listening in, but he’d bet anything they had a plan of their own.

Which meant Lance’s job was to buy Pidge time. He shot forward, raking Blue’s claws across Black’s back as she took aim at Yellow. “Tag!” he called, taking off at top speed toward open space. “You’re it!”

With a roar, the Black Lion turned and chased after him.

 _Good to know I can still annoy Haggar like no other,_ Lance thought, grinning as Keith mimicked Lance’s strategy, drawing Black off in another direction before she could tear Blue apart.

* * *

Pidge kept up a steady chorus of curses as they worked, eyes flickering from one screen to the next. It was risky enough working on this at all with Haggar in the bond; if she was as adept at peeking into Pidge’s head as Shiro and Allura, she would know exactly what they were planning.

Green was helping with that, as much as she could. Her and Ryner and Pidge were all intertwined, their minds clustered close together at the heart of a tangle of mental vines. It was the best solution they’d been able to come up with last night, and Green had passed the warning along to the other lions, so with luck they had similar protections. (Not as good as Green’s protection, though, as Green was quick to note. She was good with privacy, though Pidge couldn’t say whether that had something to do with being the guardian spirit of forest, with Pidge’s private nature, or with Green’s own personality.)

Whatever the case, Pidge welcomed it. Hopefully it would at least hamper Haggar’s attempts to spy on Pidge or influence them in some way. They needed their mind to be their own if they wanted to hack the bond.

Green still maintained it wasn’t possible—but Pidge didn’t exactly have an option. They either hacked the Black Lion, or hoped that the four of them could take her out with brute force without simply killing the paladins inside.

They looked up from their hacking every now and again to mess with Green’s systems, switching into stealth mode, trying out a new experimental laser that tracked concentrated sources of Quintessence. They doubted any of it would have any real impact on the battle, but they needed to look busy.

They’d never tried to access any of another lion’s core systems before. The comms, sure. And they’d physically installed mods like the cloaking devices.

This was different. This was slipping into the lion’s mind, lugging behind them the equivalent of a rocket launcher and hoping no one noticed. It was a ridiculous plan, one that was almost guaranteed to fail, but it was the best shot they had.

Pidge had managed to stack the deck at least somewhat. Thanks to Green they had privacy, thanks to Lance they had misdirection, and thanks to their mom they had the drive, fury, and unparalleled stubbornness to take down anyone who threatened their family.

Besides, they didn’t need to get into any one system in particular. They could work from just about anywhere—locking up the weapons, taking down the shields, mucking up the engines or the psychic link or… Well, Pidge was good at breaking things, and the virus they’d modified from a half-finished project on their computer was indiscriminate in the havoc it wreaked. Honestly, Pidge felt a little bad that they were going to break the Black Lion, but they could always patch her up later.

Besides, Black would probably rather get her programming gunked up for a day or two than be used to hurt the other paladins. Hopefully she would. Hopefully…

Pidge paused, staring at their screen. “Huh,” they said.

Ryner’s eyes flicked toward them, but she reached out with their bond rather than ask aloud. _Problem?_

 _No,_ Pidge thought back. _No, I don’t think so… There’s just something weird about this code. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the Black Lion was **giving** me access._

Confusion and concern was their only answer. Pidge sent back exasperation. Obviously it was a trap. Haggar wanted Pidge to follow her somewhere. It was tempting to follow the trail, see if it gave them any clues to how the _hell_ to pry her out of their friends’ heads, but there was too much risk. If Pidge went deep enough, could Haggar infect the Green Lion? Could she seize control of Pidge and Ryner?

Frowning, Pidge took a moment to bolster Green’s firewalls and lay a few hasty traps, then sidestepped the gaping hole in Black’s defenses and poked an opening of their own.

_All right, Haggar. Let’s see where you’re taking me._

* * *

_They’re… they’re ignoring it._ Allura fought against the rising tide of frustration. Locked inside the Black Lion’s mind, forced to watch as Haggar made them fight against their friends, she and Shiro were very nearly helpless. Nearly, but not quite.

If only Pidge would _take_ the damn opening Allura had made for them.

Perhaps the worst part was the amusement she felt from Shiro, who had his mind bent toward helping the Black Lion fight against Haggar’s control. The Red Lion crossed into the field of view—slower than she should have been—and Shiro threw himself against the weapons systems, suppressing fire just long enough for Red to make her escape. Then he and Black quieted, gathering themselves for the next clash of wills.

 _They’re being cautious,_ Shiro said, his attention darting toward her for an instant. He seemed almost proud of Pidge’s convoluted approach, curse him. _They don’t know how far Haggar’s control extends, and they aren’t taking any risks. Smart._

 _This would be far easier if I could just **talk** to them,_ Allura grumbled, and didn’t need Shiro’s commiseration to know that it was all complicated and frustrating, and the simple fact that it was Shiro and Allura who had been taken made it worse. She couldn’t decide whether to be grateful for the shields raised around the other paladins’ minds or not. The defenses kept Haggar out, but they also made it that much harder for Allura to make contact.

Each shield was different, according to the nature of the lions and their paladins. Pidge and Ryner hid deep within a screen of foliage that concealed their thoughts and intentions. Allura could feel them there, but she had a hard time stepping into Green’s cockpit—unlike with Keith, whose mind was a bonfire, his overpowering need to get Shiro back broadcast to the world. Whatever else he might have been thinking, however, was lost in that singular roar, and Allura couldn’t even attempt to nudge him along without getting scalded by the flames.

The earthen barrier around Hunk and Shay and the vast, still ocean containing Lance made their minds similarly difficult to reach, though Allura (and by extension, Haggar) could catch glimpses of them inside their lions. Even snatches of conversation sometimes, though it was difficult to make sense of what they were saying with the comms out.

Frustrating or not, Allura was proud of her paladins. They’d deepened their bonds with the lions far beyond anything Allura could have anticipated after just a few months together. Next to them, Haggar and these imposters piloting the Black Lion were _infants._

Blue was the next one to crash into the Black Lion, the impact rattling the pilots inside. Haggar might have the bodies of Shiro and Allura, but she didn’t have their minds, or their skill. They were clumsy, unused to fighting inside a Voltron Lion, and each time another lion sunk claws into her side, it disturbed them far more than it hurt Black.

Black roared in satisfaction as Blue’s attack made the Allura imposter’s grip on the pedestals falter. Allura herself pressed into the opening, clawing a little more control away from Haggar. Her attention was on the bond, where it wasn’t on aiding Pidge’s attempts at hacking. In a very real sense, this was much the same as flying Black normally, except that both paladins were fighting themselves for every small victory.

Allura wondered whether Haggar realized they were there, or if she assumed the Black Lion was the one putting up the fight. Likely she didn’t care either way; as long as she was in possession of Shiro and Allura’s bodies, she had the upper hand here. Haggar’s magic let her have her way, while Shiro and Allura had only the most tenuous of footholds. Shiro could slow attacks, sometimes alter the aim, but not prevent them outright, and Allura could scarcely glimpse anything through the bond—just enough to see that Keith sat alone in the Red Lion’s cockpit.

Hearing his voice at the start of battle had rattled Shiro, left him shuddering but more determined to fight. Realizing Matt was absent, though, had nearly shattered him. It had taken Allura and Black both to hold him together, repeating over and over the fact (Altea let it be fact) that Matt lived. He was injured, yes, and unable to fight at the moment, but he _was_ alive.

He had to be.

Allura’s body regained its footing, reasserting its hold on the twin pedestals and on the bond, but the real Allura had gained enough of a foothold to reach out toward Pidge, willing them to delve toward the opening Allura had created. They shied away from the suggestion, almost backing out entirely.

She’d never realized before how much she and Shiro counted on the other paladins’ trust, perhaps because it had never before been in question. Now, though, Pidge actively distrusted the silent prompting—and they obviously recognized Allura’s touch enough to refuse her suggestion.

She was going to have to be much more subtle about this.

* * *

Lance banked hard, his thoughts racing as he eyed the Black Lion. The battle so far had proceeded… reasonably well. Lance was pretty sure Hunk and Ryner had succeeded in giving their own lions the improved shielding, but not Red or Blue. That was okay. Shay had taken it on herself to absorb every laser that came out of the Black Lion while Hunk kept them running in top form. Ryner hung back a little more, sniping at Black’s back when she got the chance but otherwise leaving Pidge to do whatever it was they were planning.

The Black Lion turned toward Arus—not the first time it had done so during this battle. As before, Lance could almost convince himself there was a touch of reluctance to the motion. It was as though Black was fighting against Haggar’s control, as though perhaps Shiro and Allura were fighting.

No. Black might be able to shake off Haggar’s influence, maybe, but Shiro hadn’t even been aware of what she was making him do. How could he fight in that state?

Lance turned to chase after the Black Lion, letting loose a series of laser blasts that nipped at her heels. Red streaked past, landing on Black’s back and kicking off in another direction. Black wavered, but otherwise ignored the attacks, her main laser beginning to charge as an Arusian village came into sight.

“No!” Lance cried, surging forward. No way. No way in hell was he letting Haggar do this. Catching up to Black, he seized one of her wings in Blue’s jaws and fired his thrusters, trying to pull her off-course. They were near the coast, and the sight of the water stirred something in Blue’s consciousness.

 _**There,** _ Blue said. She didn’t often use words—pictures were easier—but this was short and sharp and clear, and pictures would have just muddled it up. Lance twisted, slowly beginning to edge the Black Lion away from the village and toward the water, calling out for the others.

“Help me get them away from the Arusians!” he said. There was more to the plan, more to the memories filtering into him from Blue, but Lance didn’t dare say it out loud. Didn’t dare think about it too hard for fear it would tip Haggar off.

Keith barreled into the Black Lion’s flank, shoving her—and Blue—a good half mile to the side. It wasn’t until Yellow joined in, pushing down as well as—was that west?--that Black seemed to realize what was happening. Most of the lions, Lance thought, didn’t do well with water. They were like house cats that way. Maybe they _could_ swim, but they definitely didn’t like it.

Blue, in contrast, was all but purring as, with one last effort, she drove Black beneath her into the ocean.

Below the surface, everything changed. The sunlight dimmed, sounds grew muted. The Black Lion thrashed, engines flaring, but she moved sluggishly through the water, slow to turn, slower to spot Lance as he looped around her and pushed her deeper into the ocean, farther from the coast and from the sky.

“Lance!” Keith called. “Lance, wait! I can’t take Red in there.”

Lance frowned, rolling his eyes as Black tried to shoot a hole in his cockpit. _Please._ Blue was apparently some kind of mercat or something, because she was moving better than ever—better, certainly, than Black, who roared. The sound was considerably more _kid blowing bubbles in her milk_ than _ferocious superweapon about to go supernova._

“What do you mean you can’t bring Red in? I’m pretty sure if she can survive a vacuum she can survive a little water.”

Keith snorted. “Let me rephrase,” he said impatiently. “If I force Red underwater, she will be less than useless _and_ I will end up in ribbons once she’s through with me.”

“He is not wrong,” Shay said. “The Yellow Lion is also quite clumsy underwater.”

“Green is handling acceptably well,” Ryner chimed in, laser flashing impossibly bright as she caught up with Lance. “The water slows her, but not as much as the others, I think.”

“It’s their elemental affinities,” Coran chimed in. “Forest and Water get along reasonably well, but Fire doesn’t like getting wet, and Earth...”

“Sinks like a stone?” Lance suggested. Shay’s frustrated sigh said it wasn’t far off. “I guess Sky doesn’t like being underwater, either.” He grimaced as Black thrashed again. She almost seemed to be panicking, a drowning animal fighting toward the air. “The cockpits are all watertight, though, right?”

Coran nodded. “As long as she hasn’t taken structural damage.”

Right. Well, that wasn’t a problem. The paladins had managed to leave a handful of small dents in Black’s hull, but everything up to this point had been little more than an annoyance. “Perfect. You guys stay topside, make sure Black doesn’t get back in the air. Pidge, Ryner, and I are going to take her on down here.”

“Lance,” Keith began, then faltered. Lance spared him a questioning look, but he just shook his head. “Be careful.”

* * *

Matt’s nightmares were still swirling in his head when he fell out of the cryopod. All around were shouts of pain and flashes of light and the thunder of distant explosions—except… no. No, that wasn’t right. This wasn’t Haggar’s ship.

He pushed himself up off the ground, arms shaking, and glanced around. The pod room. On the Castle of Lions. He was safe. He was okay.

“Vrekt,” someone hissed. Soft footsteps approached, and Matt was still in too much of a daze to do anything more than stare down at his shredded undersuit and wonder what the hell had happened to him. “Are you okay? Matt?”

Shaking his head, Matt looked up as Zuza swam into focus. “I’m--”

She cut him off with a gasp, flinching back. “Your eye…!”

Frowning, Matt reached up to feel his face. Without his glasses, his vision was blurred, but not any more than usual. The lighting in here was weird, maybe, but there were definitely explosions going on outside, which probably meant a battle, which probably meant something somewhere had gotten knocked out of whack.

It was in exploring the skin around his eye socket that Matt found the first sign of something wrong. His skin felt strange along the ridge of his brow and down past his temple. Little hard bumps, like some kind of rash, stood out against the rest. Some kind of allergic reaction to the pods? He’d never heard of anything like that happening before.

Wait.

Why had he been in the pods? He was pretty sure he remembered a conversation some months ago about how raw Quintessence was bad for him. He must have been in pretty rough shape if Shay had been desperate enough to risk aggravating his crystals.

He _felt_ fine, though, scaly rash notwithstanding. Still shaky, but that was typical post-stasis weakness. Nothing unusual. So why did Zuza look so freaked out as she helped him to his feet and handed him his glasses?

“Are… you sure you’re ready to be out of there?” Zuza asked.

“I’m fine,” Matt grunted. He tried to move away from Zuza, but his knee buckled, sharp pain shooting up into his hip. With a gasp, he leaned on her once more. “What happened? Where are the others?”

Zuza scratched the back of her neck. “Off fighting, I think. Coran asked me to stay down here and call him if anything changed with your pod.” She paused, brow furrowing. “D’you think you waking up counts as a change?”

Ignoring her, Matt staggered to the comms station at the side of the room and hailed the bridge. Something about his vision was still funny—the colors, maybe, or the way even the pod room’s dim lights seemed to reflect off shiny surfaces with a dagger’s tip. He blinked a few times, rubbing his eyes while he waited for Coran to answer.

“What is it, Zuz--” Coran broke off at the sight of Matt, eyes going wide.

“What’s going on, Coran?” Matt asked. “We’re fighting? What happened with the rescue? How long was I out?”

Coran shook his head, frowning. “Not long. Less than a day. Haggar took Allura and the Black Lion--”

“ _What?_ ”

“--and the others are out there now trying to get them all back. Are… Are you sure you should be up, Matt?”

“I’m _fine._ ” Matt glared at Zuza, who was creeping up behind him, face pinched with worry. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”

Coran paused, then tapped something on his control panel. The video feed on Matt’s screen changed so that, instead of showing Coran up on the bridge, it now showed Matt. And he looked… _holy shit._ His face was gaunt and pale, deep shadows under his eyes. What Matt had assumed was a rash was actually little bits of crystal growing over his skin like scabs.

And his _eye_. It was blue.

“What the hell?” he whispered, leaning forward. It was just one eye; his right was still its normal shade of amber. But the left eye… The left eye looked fake somehow, like it had been replaced with a glass eye while he was sleeping. The iris was pale periwinkle blue streaked with tiny veins of lavender and almost seemed to be glowing.

The pupil seemed hazy somehow, too, but when he closed his other eye he couldn’t see much of a difference. It might have been a little out of focus, a little more sensitive to the light coming off the cryopods, the glow of the crystal lamps around the perimeter of the room.

Matt closed his eyes, breathing deeply. “I’m fine,” he said for the third time. “I don’t know what that is, but it doesn’t seem to be causing any problems. Where are the others? I need to go help.”

“They’re in their lions right now,” Coran said. “And you’re still recovering.”

“She has Shiro, Coran. I’m not sitting this one out.”

Rather than argue, Coran turned and yelled at Tev to focus the lasers on sector fourteen. “Bring him up to the bridge, Zuza, would you? We could use the help.”

Matt opened his mouth to protest, but Coran had already cut the comms line. “Great,” he muttered. “I couldn’t have woken up an hour ago?”

Zuza gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder, then led him toward the door. Fighting down his frustration, Matt leaned on her, the pain in his leg never abating. At least on the bridge, he’d be able to talk to the others, see how the battle was going. He’d know right away if something changed and Keith was able to come pick him up. Until then, he’d just have to content himself with manning the drones or something.

His leg twinged again, and Matt squeezed Zuza’s hand. “Wait,” he said. “Prep room first.” He was going to need his armor and its leg brace if he was going to do anyone any good.

* * *

Hacking while underwater was strangely calming, Pidge found. Sure, Green was mildly put out by the situation, but Black was worse. There were few lasers to distract Pidge, and none of them found their target. Ryner was mostly here to poke at the Black Lion while Lance swum circles around her in Blue, chipping away at her shields. Pidge wasn’t sure if he had a plan; take out the engines, maybe?

Well, Pidge still had their virus. It was a quicker solution, if they could get it to work, but Lance was doing a damn good job of keeping Allura and Shiro occupied. Pidge hadn’t felt a single nudge from them since they hit the water.

Pidge was almost through, too. They’d ignored the glaring weak spots Haggar opened up in their path, choosing instead to focus where the defenses were—well, not their _strongest_ , but at least competent. There had been a voice in the back of their head telling them not to do this, so they figured it was a pretty safe bet for the smart choice.

Green rumbled, somewhere between pride and discomfort, as Pidge stripped away the last few layers of security. Any moment now, they would be in, and all they would have to do was drop their digital bomb and—

Something visceral inside Pidge shifted, a shadow creeping through the forest Green had raised around their mind.

Ryner’s mind flashed alarm while Pidge was still reeling from the sudden attack. Haggar… This had to be Haggar. But how? Pidge had set up defenses. They’d made sure Haggar couldn’t slip in while they were hacking, unless…

Oh.

_Oh, no._

The defenses. They hadn’t really thought about them, just slapped on whatever felt right and gone back to their hacking.

Looking at them now, Pidge realized the defenses they’d put up were worse than pathetic. They couldn’t have kept out a monkey with a tin can, let alone one of the smartest, scariest people in the universe. Despite all their preparations, despite all their warnings about not listening to the voice in their head, Pidge had done just that, and now Haggar was within inches of tearing down Green’s last mental shields and claiming two more paladins for her collection.

Ryner reached out, her hand closing around Pidge’s upper arm, and their eyes locked. This wasn’t the time to berate themself; they had to focus. But the shadows were closing in, threading through the trees, corrupting them, reaching oily black fingers toward Pidge’s mind.

Something new entered the bond. New, but at the same time familiar. A whisper in Pidge’s ear, a touch on their shoulder, a presence so intimately _known_ that not even Haggar could have faked it.

“Shiro?” they breathed, so quiet not even Ryner heard, though her mind had caught that same familiar presence.

The presence drew closer. There were definitely shadows creeping through the forest in Pidge’s mind—but not all of those shadows were out to hurt her. Some of them were Shiro—Shiro and Allura—and they formed a barrier around Pidge and Ryner, a wall that pushed back Haggar’s spreading influence.

Pidge didn’t question it. Maybe that was Shiro and Allura, alive and conscious and fighting back. Maybe it was some part of their subconscious lashing out on instinct. Maybe it was just Pidge’s imagination. Whatever the case, it had bought them time.

They began to type, sorting through Black’s code, trying to find somewhere they could shut her down. That was the important thing—without Black, Haggar couldn’t use the psychic link. Without Black, Shiro and Allura would have to fight in person, which would give the paladins a chance, at least, to bring them home.

They very quickly realized that they’d underestimated the complexity of this task.

A nudge.

 _Don’t listen._ Pidge had told themself that time and time again since realizing what Haggar could do through the black paladins. _If you hear a voice in your head,_ _go the opposite way._

Well, Pidge had tried that, and Haggar had still played them like a game of Pong. There was a difference between this voice and the feather touch that had maneuvered Pidge into laying weak defenses. One was Haggar, pulling the strings, trying to remain unnoticed. The other came openly—not forcing, but asking.

At its base, this was a question of trust: did they trust their friends more than they suspected Haggar?

Pidge took a deep breath, closed their eyes, and listened.

Their hands were moving before they consciously processed the impulse shooting through them. This was—this was--

 _Genius,_ Ryner thought, her mind subdued. Pidge glanced at her, but they were inclined to agree. They’d been so focused on trying to get into the Black Lion’s head that they never stopped to realize.

They already had the opening they needed.

“Guys,” Pidge said, hands shaking. They glanced at Ryner, who nodded. “Do you trust me?”

The other paladins were silent for a long moment, and Pidge held their breath. There was no way to explain the plan, or the fact that it was Shiro who had come up with it. Every word they said was a knife Haggar could turn back on them.

Lance was the first to answer, a soft, “Of course we trust you.”

“You’ve never steered us wrong before,” Hunk added.

Keith caught their eye and nodded, and Pidge looked up at the Black Lion, visible on the screen. It still struggled toward the surface, but it was too clumsy to keep up with Blue.

“Let Black get back in the air,” Pidge said.

The tendrils reaching out for Pidge’s mind quieted, the lull letting Shiro and Allura drive them backwards. Green wove new vines around her paladins, shielding their plans from Haggar’s curiosity. It was a long moment before Pidge realized the others hadn’t yet answered.

“Trust us,” Ryner said, giving the words a tremendous weight. “We have a plan.”

Lance blinked, his brow furrowing, then backed off. “All right,” he said. “Just tell us what you need.”

Ryner pressed her lips together, and Pidge noted tension through the bond. This could fail, and it would mean the end of Team Voltron. Was this the right call?

It was too late for second guessing. The Black Lion shot through the opening left by the Blue Lion’s retreat, water churning behind her as she burst out through the surf, Green and Blue nipping at her tail. Pidge’s heart was pounding as the voice inside them urged them onward.

“Okay,” they said. “Now, we form Voltron. I know!” they shouted, overriding the wave of protests that followed. “I know. Haggar can overwhelm any one mind—maybe any pair. But if we all unite against her, we can force her out. This _will_ work.”

It felt oddly like something Allura would say. Maybe it _was_ Allura, speaking through Pidge, or implanting the words in their chest.

It was also total bullshit.

But Hunk was nodding along with Shay. Keith looked thoughtful. Haggar’s presence in Pidge’s mind was downright gleeful. Only Lance seemed to sense there was more Pidge didn’t want to say, and all he did was nod.

“I’m going to go ahead and assume you know what you’re talking about,” he said, and his eyes said he wasn’t talking about plan ‘Defeat Haggar with the Power of Friendship.’

Pidge smiled, nodding to Lance. At a nudge from Shiro, they turned their eyes to the Black Lion and cried, “Everyone together! Form Voltron!”

Even as the change began, Pidge’s fingers began to fly. The Green Lion rearranged around them, limbs tucking in, gears sliding out of place to prepare for new connections. Haggar’s presence rose to a fever pitch, screaming her victory inside Pidge’s head. From the gasps on the comms and the distant sense of horror, Pidge suspected they and Ryner were no longer the only ones feeling it.

Ryner urged Green closer to the Black Lion as the connection began to solidify. The others were all fighting now, trying to pull back, though the momentum had caught them up now. Somewhere, more distant still, Coran seemed to have finally realized what was happening down on Arus and had begun shouting in dismay.

The Black Lion reached out first for Green, a spiritual connection coming together with the mechanical interlock. Pidge felt it in their core, and when they caught sight of their reflection in their laptop’s screen, they shivered. A cold yellow light was beginning to creep in at the edges of their eye, spreading rapidly.

_Fuck you, Haggar._

In the instant when the two lions should have connected, the instant their eyes turned completely yellow, Pidge deployed their virus. They’d intended it for the Black Lion, a ruthless attack that would fry most systems and leave it virtually dead.

It worked just as well on two lions as one.

There was a horrible, blood curdling roar as the connection locked in. Shadows clawed once more, desperately, toward Pidge and Ryner, thorns flaying Pidge’s mind, claws rending their flesh as Haggar strained to maintain her hold. Then everything fell away. The shadows, the forest, the muted horror from the other paladins.

Shiro and Allura stayed, though. Even as Ryner cried out that she’d lost power, that they were falling, Pidge could see Shiro and Allura standing over them.

 _Thank you,_ Allura whispered.

Then came the impact, and all Pidge knew after that was blackness.

* * *

Lance screamed as the Green and Black Lions, still interconnected in a strange, half-formed imitation of Voltron, crashed down on the beach. A spray of sand and water kicked up some hundred feet, leaving a faint golden arc across the green hillside beyond.

“Pidge! Ryner!”

“Vrekt,” Keith hissed. It took less than a second for the three remaining lions to revert to their normal form, but Keith didn’t even wait that long. Red was already limping toward the ground before she had any proper steering or thrust. She landed awkwardly, digging a trench through the sand before finally coming to rest halfway up the grassy slope beyond.

Lance and Shay landed a moment later, scrambling out of their lions. Whatever Pidge had done had worked. God _damn_ but it had worked. Lance wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to get that image out of his head—Green and Black intertwined, spasming once before locking up, rigid and lifeless even before they hit the ground.

Keith skidded to a stop beside Green’s mouth, screaming for Pidge and Ryner. There was no sign of movement within, or at least none that Lance could see from fifty meters up the beach.

 _Please,_ he thought, feet churning up sand, slipping, digging in. _Please let them be alive. Please let them still be them._

Long before Lance reached the downed lions, Matt’s voice came on the comms. “What the _hell_ is going on down there?”

“Matt!” Hunk cried, his breath beginning to turn shallow as he and Shay sprinted after Lance. “You’re okay!”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “I crawl out of a cryopod just in time to see the Green Lion’s signal go dead. What happened?”

Lance opened his mouth to answer, but found he didn’t know how to explain. Fortunately—or maybe not so fortunately—he was spared that difficulty. The emergency access hatch atop the Black Lion’s head released, and Shiro crawled through, followed by Allura. Both were dressed in the black and silver armor Galra foot soldiers wore, Allura carrying her staff, Shiro’s arm already humming white-violet with power.

Whatever hope Lance had held out that taking out the Black Lion might have severed Haggar’s hold on Allura was crushed at the sight of them there, eyes glowing, faces contorted into unnatural smiles. Shiro’s cybernetic arm showed no signs of the crack from Shay’s shield—evidently Haggar had had time to fix it. Maybe even improve it.

Keith heard the pair of them hit the sand behind him, and he spun, drawing his sword. He didn’t move away from the Green Lion, though, holding his ground even as Shiro and Allura bore down on him. Swearing, Lance summoned his rifle and opened fire, driving them back until he, Hunk, and Shay joined Keith.

“Okay,” Hunk muttered, hands restless on the gun he’d taken from the castle-ship’s stores. “Plan?”

Lance hesitated. He’d wanted to split up—leave Pidge, Ryner, and Hunk to distract Allura while Lance, Keith, and Shay focused on Shiro—but that wasn’t going to work now. “Shiro’s top priority,” Lance said. “We take out his arm, Haggar loses her grip on Allura, too. Hunk, do what you can to distract Allura. Shay, defense.”

Her head twitched toward him, confusion plain in the slope of her shoulders. “But I thought...”

“If you get a chance, go for it, one hundred percent,” Lance said, though he doubted Shiro would come at Shay like that again. Not after what had happened last time. “Keith’s got his own plan, though, so which one of you gets through first doesn’t matter.”

Keith didn’t react to Lance leaving himself out of the battle plan, which was just as well. Surprise was just about the only weapon they had left, and Lance didn’t plan on going melee unless he had a clear shot.

“Lance,” Matt said, his voice tight. “Where’s Pidge?”

“With Ryner,” Lance said shortly. “Beyond that, I couldn’t tell you.” Shiro and Allura were moving again, pressing forward now that the onslaught of lasers had slowed. Keith ran forward, roaring as he closed the distance to Shiro, and Lance shot at Allura once, forcing her to retreat. Keith might be able to best Shiro. Now that he had a clear goal, one that didn’t involve actually killing Shiro, he might. But not if he had to worry about Allura, too.

After that, there was no more time to talk. Allura threw herself once more at Keith and Shiro, clawing her way past the other's defensive line, and it was all they could do to keep her away.

* * *

“I’m going down there.”

Coran turned, glaring at Matt. “You’re joking.”

Matt’s eyes flashed—and not metaphorically. There was a very real light glowing behind that new blue pigment in his left eye, and it bled momentarily white, like sunlight catching the facets of a Balmera crystal. “Pidge is down there. They could be hurt. And the others--”

“ _You’re_ hurt,” Zuza said, her voice soft. She’d kept to the back of the bridge, out of the way of the flurry of activity that was Coran and his crew, but she hadn’t taken the chance to run once she passed Matt off into Coran’s care. Maybe she thought she could help, maybe she planned to make sure Matt stayed put. Maybe she was just too scared to leave and pretend this battle wasn’t happening.

Matt frowned at her, as though he hadn’t realize she’d stayed. “We need all the help we can get.”

“We need help _here_ ,” Coran said, more than a little distracted as Haggar’s fleet mounted another wave. The castle-ship was still limping from its recent battles—first in the Kera Sector, then the failed rescue effort last night. Zelka’s crew had worked through the night to repair the shields, so those at least were holding, but Tev, Zelka, and Coran were hard-pressed to keep up with the hordes of fighters and support ships hounding them from every angle.

Coran glanced around the bridge—at the bleary-eyed Zelka manning three security drones while also monitoring the shields; at Tev, his fur frazzled, his eyes strained as he trained the castle’s main lasers wherever he thought they could do the most good; at Wyn, manning a drone himself. The fact that the boy was actually providing some noticeable support spoke more to the state of the crew than to Wyn’s battle prowess.

Shaking his head, Matt took a step backward. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Then, before Coran could stop him, he was gone.

* * *

Shay tried to steel her nerves, but the battle threatened to overwhelm her. The angry hiss of Shiro’s arm, the crack of Allura’s staff against her shield… It was too much. She had known, when she began, that she was not meant for battle, and yet she had persisted. She called herself paladin, and _this_ was how she showed it? By cowering as her friends fought? By flinching back from the fight in which she alone could neutralize Haggar’s greatest advantage?

Hunk had tried to wield her shield. He had tried, and he had tried, but the bayard would not maintain its shape for him, and no amount of focus had granted him the ability to summon a similar form. Certainly he could manage a shield, but it was not so very much different from the shields embedded in their armor.

Keith still fought Shiro a short distance away from the other half of the battle. Hunk fired a line of lasers into the sand to keep Allura from joining them, his assault leaving behind it a string of tiny glass shapes, half buried but glittering like crystals.

Lance had been hoping Hunk alone could distract Allura; Shay saw this truth in the way his eyes narrowed every time they turned toward that battle. He had been hoping to focus most of their strength on Shiro.

But Allura was too fast, too nimble. When Hunk attacked, she danced aside, gliding across the sand as though it did not exist and closing in on Hunk. Lance had told Shay to protect Hunk, and she obliged gladly, though not without the bitter taste of shame. Protecting someone, protecting _Hunk_ most especially, was an easier task by far than attacking a friend.

And she knew she should have been doing more.

She flinched as Allura’s staff came down on her shield. The bayard held, of course; Allura’s staff merely skidded to one side, whistling as Allura spun into another attack. Shay was safe behind her defenses. But she did not feel safe. She felt exposed. She felt wrung out.

She felt like a child who had suddenly become aware of how very far from home she was.

Allura’s next attack knocked Shay’s shield out of balance. She stumbled back, trying to find her center, trying to remember the things Hunk had showed her on the training deck last night. She was so tired, and so very much out of her depth…

Hunk roared in fury, opening fire on Allura before she could move into the opening she had created. Allura’s face contorted in rage, and she reversed direction, dropping low to avoid Hunk’s barrage, then swinging upward and knocking the gun from Hunk’s hands.

“Hunk!” Shay cried, spinning toward him. She already knew she would be too slow. You could not run into a clash with a shield; you needed to be grounded. You needed to be steady.

Shay ran anyway, forgetting herself, forgetting her fear. In this, it was simple.

If she did not act, a friend would die.

But Allura was faster. She swept Hunk’s feet out from under him, flipped her staff around, and brought the butt down on Hunk’s chest. The armor cracked. Hunk scrambled back. Roaring, Shay threw herself into the space between Hunk and Allura, but she was off-balance and turned all wrong to block. Allura’s first swing sent her sprawling, her head ringing, her body aching.

She had never felt such shame that she was not a warrior.

Allura turned back to Hunk, and Shay slowly, achingly, pulled herself to her feet. The staff rose as Hunk scrambled back, and his face said he knew he had lost.

Two pulses of bright, searing light flashed past Shay’s head. The first struck Allura’s shoulder, throwing her staff out of alignment so that it drove down into the sand beside Hunk’s head instead of directly into the weakness in his armor. The second light struck Allura’s back. She stumbled, then spun, her lip pulled back in a snarl.

“Are you all right, Hunk?” Ryner asked, sliding down the side of the Green Lion. Her helmet was gone, a narrow stripe of blood slicking the side of her face. As her feet touched sand, she fired again, alternating shots from each of the two pistols she carried. One Shay recognized as her usual weapon, one of the odd, sleek, organic-looking weapons from Olkarion. The other was similar in shape but clearly made of metal—green and silver, with neon blue lights glowing in the grip.

The green bayard.

The steady stream of fire forced Allura back, one step at a time, Ryner careful to aim precisely and guide Allura where Ryner wanted her to go. Hunk rolled onto his side and snatched up his gun, but only managed to climb to his knees before he stopped, looking pained.

“I’ll live,” he said. “Pidge?”

“Unconscious, but alive.” Ryner’s eyes narrowed, and she turned the bayard to the side to shoot at Shiro, forcing him back away from Keith, who looked nearly as harrowed as Shay felt. “Haggar went for them pretty hard right at the end there. Nearly took control before the connection was severed, I think.”

Shay shivered, glancing back toward the Green Lion. “Will they recover?”

“I think so,” Ryner said. Her composure faltered for a moment, anger causing her antennae to twitch violently. “We need to end this.”

“Okay, agreed.” Hunk paused, breathing hard, then climbed to his feet. Allura had turned her attention to the other battle, but a burst of laserfire from Hunk brought her up short. “But how?”

Ryner’s mouth tightened. “I don’t know yet. We’ll think of something.”

* * *

“They’re still coming,” Zelka said, her voice grave. “Commander, we can’t keep this up.”

Coran closed his eyes, letting the news wash over him. Nothing he hadn’t thought already. Haggar had turned her full might on the castle-ship, and what hasty repairs the crew had managed were close to being undone. Zuza, who had taken up defensive drones along with Wyn, Zelka, and Coran, let out a small, frightened noise.

Coran flashed her a smile, then glanced at Wyn. He’d held up remarkably well thus far, refusing Coran’s efforts to send him away somewhere he didn’t have to watch the battle progress, but the reality of the situation seemed to have finally settled in. He shrank in on himself, his eyes wide, his hands shaking on his drone controls.

“Are we going to die?” he asked.

Around the room, everyone tensed, and Coran’s insides turned over. He remembered being young and scared, like them. He remembered joining the Voltron Guard with dreams of bringing peace and prosperity to the universe, not realizing the horror it took to get there.

He remembered the first time he’d stared his own death in the face and realized he hadn’t been prepared in the slightest.

“No,” he said. “We’re not going to die, Wyn.” The thud of lasers on the shields undermined his bold assertion somewhat, but Coran didn’t back down. “We’re the Voltron Guard—we’re not going to lose to a shrimpy little fleet like this!”

Tev squared his shoulders at that, and Zelka nodded her approval. Zuza looked less than convinced—not that Coran could blame her; it had been mediocre, as inspiring speeches went.

Wyn seemed to have barely heard Coran at all.

“It’s my fault,” he whispered.

Coran’s heart clenched. “What? Don’t be ridiculous, Wyn, this is--”

“She wants me back.” Wyn let go of his drone controls, pulling his legs up onto his chair and wrapping his arms around his head. “I’m sorry.”

“You’ve got nothing to apologize for,” Coran said firmly. A blast from one of the gunships struck the shield just outside the bridge, turning the viewscreen white for an instant. Wyn stiffened, curling tighter in on himself. Coran’s gaze flickered to Zuza. “Get him out of here.” The poor boy had suffered enough; he didn’t need to face another battle.

But Wyn flinched away from Zuza’s touch, squeezing his head between his hands. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Another laser struck the bridge, and Wyn screamed, the sound tearing Coran’s heart.

Then, all at once, the room was silent.

Coran turned, expecting to see Haggar’s command ship charging an ion cannon, or something of the sort. One final salvo to finish of the Castle of Lions.

Instead, he found a sea of motionless Galra fighters.

They hung there, dark and dead, facing toward the castle-ship. Not a single one opened fire. None so much as drifted out of formation, though the gunners and other support ships at the back seemed unaffected by… whatever this was.

After a long, silent moment, one of the gunships took aim at the castle. No sooner had the laser struck the shield, rocking the bridge and making Wyn cry out in fear, than did the fighters turn as one unit and open fire on the gunner, reducing it to slag in the blink of an eye.

“What?” Coran breathed, his lungs deflating at the sight. Confusion reigned over the Galra for another moment before lasers began to fly once more—not aimed at the castle-ship this time, though. Aimed at the fighters, which returned fire with uncanny precision. One by one the support ships began to fall. Fighters disintegrated, too. They fell by the dozens. But there were hundreds of them, and the other ships couldn’t fire quick enough to stave off the assault.

“Wyn?” Zuza asked. “Wyn, what are you--?”

Coran turned, watching in numb silence as Wyn strode toward the viewscreen at the front of the bridge. He had his head down, his hands tucked against his stomach. He was shaking. Feeling ill, Coran hurried after him, calling his name.

Wyn didn’t turn, but Coran got far enough ahead to catch a glimpse of his face. It showed no expression, and his eyes seemed utterly hollow.

“Wyn?”

The light of the lasers reflected in Wyn’s eyes. He followed the flow of battle, or—no. No, he would turn his eyes toward a gunner or an assault ship, and only then would the fighters redirect their fire.

 _By the ancients,_ Coran thought, horrified. _He’s… controlling them?_

It lasted mere minutes. Ship after ship fell, burning away to nothing. Eventually, it was just the castle, Haggar’s command ship, and a few dozen scattered fighters.

All at once, Wyn collapsed, sobbing. Coran knelt beside him, rubbing small circles on his back. He couldn’t take his eyes off the battlefield, watching in silent horror as Tev and Zelka picked off the last few fighters before they could remember who it was they were _supposed_ to be attacking.

Slowly, Coran tore his eyes away from the devastation and looked down at the boy clinging to his shirt, his body shaking with the force of his sobs. _Quiznak, Wyn. What did Haggar do to you?_

* * *

Wind howled in Matt’s ears. His leg was fire, his hands aching from the effort of clinging to the Altean glider. Allura had given them all basic training on the things, on the grounds that they might be needed in an emergency.

Well, this was an emergency, and Matt was starting to wish he’d listened to his gut instinct and continued to think of these things as shiny metal death traps.

The gliders were little more than an engine and a windshield and an unobstructed view of your own impending doom. Matt hurtled toward the ground, wishing his view of the hills and sand and sea below wasn't quite so crystal clear.

But he’d needed a way down to the surface. The battle called out to him, a white-hot hook biting into his skin and tearing, dragging him downward even faster than the glider could carry him. Shiro was down there. Keith was down there. Pidge was down there, and he hadn’t heard their voice in several long minutes.

He _needed_ to be there.

The ground drew nearer, and Matt tried to slow his descent. The way Allura described it, it should have been simple. Pull your legs toward your chest. Flare the reverse boosters. The glider would reorient automatically for the smoothest landing.

Yeah, tucking into a little ball would have been hard enough with his leg screaming in pain only barely kept at bay by the adrenaline. Add on the fact that he was falling at something close to a hundred miles an hour, and it was a lost cause.

He screamed, squeezing the throttle for the reverse thrusters as tight as he could. Green filled his vision for an instant, still moving too fast.

Then he hit, the glider ripped out of his hands, green ground and blue sky flashing by as he rolled.

He stopped abruptly, but it was much longer before the world stopped spinning. His head throbbed, his body ached, his eyes felt full of sand, but he forced himself to move, reminding himself of the people who needed him. Pidge. Keith. Lance. Hunk and Shay and Ryner. Allura. _Shiro._

Slowly, Matt got his feet beneath him, summoning his bayard as a sword and using it to lever himself upright.

 _I’m coming,_ he thought. _I’m coming._

* * *

Lance’s plan was falling apart.

Maybe he shouldn’t have expected anything less, but it was still frustrating. He’d originally planned to isolate Shiro, take him down while half the team distracted Allura. Then Pidge went down, and he’d had to revise.

So he’d revised, letting Keith get in close to Shiro, hold his attention, while Lance split his attention between Shiro and Allura. Shay had moved in close to Keith, ready to defend him, but Shiro eyed her shield warily and turned aside whenever it looked like he might run up against it.

That, at least, Lance had anticipated. But he couldn’t help wishing that, for once, something would go his way.

Haggar seemed to have finally realized that the paladins had a slight advantage as long as they kept a wedge between Shiro and Allura. They were both short-range fighters; unless they were literally back-to-back, they couldn’t offer each other support. But Lance, Ryner, and Hunk were all ranged fighters, able to turn their fire on Shiro or Allura as the battle demanded.

So Haggar had changed things, _again._

Kicking Shay’s feet out from under her, Shiro twisted out of the way of Keith’s next strike. He caught Keith’s wrist as it passed and threw Keith over his shoulder, flashed a cold smile in Lance’s direction, then turned and took off running.

Keith roared, scrambling to his feet and giving chase. Shay was close behind, but Lance called out to her.

“Stay here!” he said. “Keep Allura off the others. And—keep an eye out. Haggar will have druids around waiting to steal Allura back if we manage to break Haggar’s control, just like last time.”

Shay nodded, and Lance took off after Keith and Shiro. He had a plan. Half a plan. The tattered remnants of a plan—but it had been a _good_ plan at the start. The core of it still held true. Okay, so he was having to improvise a lot of it, but that was fine. He could improvise. Keith basically _always_ improvised, and it usually worked out okay for him.

Besides, Shiro had made it clear that Shay’s bayard wasn’t going to win this battle.

Shiro charged along the beach away from the other half of the battle. A cliff, fifty or sixty feet tall, loomed over them, and Shiro leaped, firing a burst of violet from the jets on his armor to carry him to the top. Keith followed, Lance not far behind.

Shiro was waiting for them at the top, his arm wreathed in blackness as it swung for Keith’s neck. Keith, perched on the precipice, had nowhere to run.

Lance roared, his bayard changing shape. The not-yet-familiar weight of the glaive fell into his hands, and he swung even as his feet touched down on the grassy bluff, metal striking metal and kicking up sparks. He spun through the attack, as Coran had showed him, using his whole body to lend his strike weight.

Shiro fell back two steps, blinking in surprise. That was more than enough time for Keith to regain his balance and press forward, striking toward Shiro’s prosthetic arm again and again, a ceaseless flurry of cuts and jabs.

Lance had expected their duel to walk a fine line. Shiro and Keith paired up for sparring more often than any of the other paladins. They knew each other, and they knew how the other fought.

But Lance could see that Shiro didn’t fight like himself. When Keith struck for a weakness, he found none, and when he found an opening, he seemed nearly as surprised as Shiro. The only comfort was that Shiro seemed not to have any more of an advantage. He was strong, and fast, and powerful, but Lance had seen him exploit Keith’s weaknesses on the training deck.

Ironically, the real Shiro could have won this fight much more quickly than Haggar’s imposter.

* * *

Matt crested a hill, panting, and was not at all surprised to find Keith below him, near the edge of a cliff. He’d felt him, the bond they shared dragging Matt toward him. Watching Keith and Lance fight Shiro—a sword and a spear against Shiro’s cybernetic arm—Matt felt his desperation rise. He knew, somehow, that it was really Keith’s desperation he felt. It reached him through the bond, weaker and more distant than it would have been inside the Red Lion, but no less real.

Keith was nearing the end of his strength. His soul screamed for Shiro, strained toward him, and there was a focus about him that hadn’t been there the last time he fought Shiro.

Lance hung back, switching rapidly between spear and rifle. He shot to distract Shiro from Keith’s assaults, then charged in, blade swinging high, when Shiro’s back was turned.

Matt saw it, and he understood. His stomach turned over, but he understood.

_Stop me._

Shiro’s voice echoed in Matt’s ears. He thought it was memory, words grasped by his mind as he struggled for consciousness, the wreckage of a battle strewn around him. Maybe it had been a dream, a hallucination brought on by the pain. Even if it was, that didn’t make it any less true.

_You have to stop me._

And Matt knew—that was exactly what Keith and Lance meant to do: Stop Shiro. By any means necessary.

He saw the moment the tide of battle shifted. Lance, still awkward and unpracticed at short-range combat, pressed too hard, and Shiro fell on the opportunity like a hawk. He spun, slapping Lance’s bayard away, then circled behind him and _slammed_ his hand into Lance’s jetpack, crushing it. Lance staggered, and Shiro heaved backward, yanking Lance off his feet by his ruined jetpack. He pivoted and flung Lance toward the cliff’s edge.

“Lance!” Keith screamed, diving after him. He hit the ground just as Lance vanished from Matt’s line of sight, then lurched forward, crying out in pain, as he caught Lance. His fear roared in Matt’s chest, and Matt broke into a dash even before he realized Shiro had turned toward Keith, stalking forward, a cold smile playing across his face.

“Keith!” Lance cried, his voice a strained whisper in Matt’s ear. “Keith, don’t--”

“I won’t,” Keith said. He looked over his shoulder as Shiro approached, straining to pull Lance back up onto solid ground. The earth beneath his elbow gave way, and he dropped back to the ground, the breath rushing out of him. “I won’t drop you.”

Lance’s voice turned desperate. “Shiro’s just going to kill us both. Forget me—just get Shiro back.”

“I’m not trading one of you for the other, Lance!”

Shiro reached Keith, who twisted, snarling though the knot of fear echoing in Matt’s chest hadn’t loosened. Staring up at his best friend, watching as the glowing cybernetic arm raised, ready for the kill, Keith felt fear. Fear, and guilt. He should have been able to stop Shiro. He’d promised he would see this through. But he wouldn’t let Lance die.

Matt smiled, sad, as he raised his sword and charged toward Shiro’s back. Keith finally noticed him there. Their eyes locked, and they understood each other perfectly and completely.

Someone had to do it. Keith couldn’t… but Matt could.

Shiro finally realized something was happening. He started to turn, but Matt was already upon him.

Matt’s blade bit into the back of Shiro’s arm, just above the socket of his prosthetic arm. Those hollow yellow eyes widened, and Matt stared into them, hoping Haggar could taste his fury. He’d thrown his full weight against his sword, and it continued forward, cutting cleanly through the bone and out the other side.

Haggar’s prosthetic thumped to the ground, still active, the grass around it smoldering. Shiro wavered, the light fading from his eyes an instant before they rolled back in his head and he collapsed beside his arm.

Matt’s knees screamed as they hit the grass, his head going fuzzy. He thought he’d dismissed his bayard, but there it was in his hand, the blade dripping blood. Someone was shouting nearby, shouting and moving, but Matt couldn’t make himself look away from Shiro’s shockingly pale face.

Someone seized his arm and dragged him behind a translucent shield as black mist condensed nearby. Then there was an explosion of blue light, a bright, hot ember on his cheek.

The Red Lion roared as she hit the ground where the last traces of the black mist still clung to a limp, bloody body.

* * *

Ryner didn’t need Lance’s sudden, tired cry of triumph to know the others had succeeded in their plan. One moment Allura was swinging for Shay’s head. Then, quite suddenly, her eyes fluttered closed. She collapsed at Shay’s feet, her staff rolling from her hands.

It took Ryner a moment to remember what had happened the last time the paladins nearly reclaimed Shiro. Shay, fortunately, seemed to be expecting the druid who arrived a second after Allura collapsed. Even as the smoke swirled in the air, Shay threw herself atop Allura, roaring her defiance. The druid reached for Allura, but Shay slammed her shield into his face. He teleported several feet away—but not before the hooked beak of his mask shattered.

“Get her out of here!” Hunk roared to Shay, already opening fire on the druid. Ryner moved to help, but a flicker of motion atop the nearby hill caught her attention. There was another druid there, a limp figure slung over his shoulder.

A limp figure in green armor.

“No.” The word escaped on a rush of air, the last full breath Ryner could take as she turned and sprinted for the second druid. They had Pidge. They were taking Pidge.

_No._

She wouldn’t let them.

Hunk was shouting again; he’d realized what was happening, but he couldn’t help Pidge without leaving Allura and Shay vulnerable.

It didn’t matter. Ryner ran, holstering her usual pistol. It would do her no good in this; even if she could be certain she wouldn’t hit Pidge, the druids had already proved capable of evading laser fire. So she focused instead on the bayard. She’d had little practice with it, but she knew what it was capable of, and she knew that it was connected to her lion. It was tech, and it was organic—as close to an Olkari device as she’d ever seen from offworlders. She prayed it would prove as pliable in her hands.

The bayard resisted for a moment, and then it molded itself to her wrist. It was a gauntlet with a glowing stone set into the back of Ryner’s hand, colder and more pristine than anything she’d made in the forests of her home—but she knew that feeling. The rush of clarity, the heady power.

It was an amplifier as good as any she had built for herself.

The druid on the hilltop finally noticed Ryner charging for him. He cocked his head, perhaps wondering what an old woman, weary and unarmed, thought she could do against his magic.

He didn’t realize that Ryner had learned long ago not to try to play by the rules of the Galra Empire.

She left the beach behind, feet hitting the harder soil of the hillside, and forced all of her Quintessence into the amplifier. The stone on her hand glowed brightly, stinging Ryner’s eyes. She didn’t blink, though the druid twisted his head to shield his eyes.

With a roar, Ryner forced her will into the grass around her, awakening the plants of this world. Arus was tamer than Olkarion, more docile, but she twisted it. The grass grew, sprouting razor-edged blades and woody shoots that streamed toward the druid, who raised his hand to blast the plants away with a bolt of lightning.

A spark spat from his palm, then died in the air.

The druid faltered, and Ryner smiled, pushing more of herself into the grass beneath his feet. She made it _hungry,_  gave it tendrils to grip his feet and draw out his Quintessence.

He realized too late what she had done, and by the time he tried to teleport away he no longer had the strength. He looked down at himself, then back up at Ryner’s advancing wall of greenery.

He had time for only a short roar as the plants impaled him, twisted arms of mutant grass burrowing into his chest while the woody shoots wrapped around Pidge, shielding them from the druid.

He was dead by the time Ryner arrived, panting, her whole body trembling from exertion. The bayard flashed as it dissipated, and the altered plants wilted. Ryner lifted Pidge out of the wooden sanctuary, cradling them in her arms.

A shout of fear rose from the beach, and Ryner turned. The other druid stared at her, his mask crumbling, revealing a sharp violet chin beneath. His mouth gaped, his hands shook. Ryner looked to the corpse of the druid beside her as her dying plants drooped toward the ground, borne down by the man’s weight.

Then the druid on the beach teleported away, and Ryner sank to her knees.

The Red Lion landed beside her, lowering her head. Lance charged out, glanced at Pidge, and closed his eyes. “Get them on,” he said, then turned and raised his voice. “Shay! Grab Allura!”

Ryner stumbled into the Red Lion’s open mouth with Pidge, collapsing on the ramp as they began to move, skimming toward the beach, where Shay hauled Allura onboard. Somewhere above, Keith was swearing, Matt whispering Shiro’s name in an endless refrain.

“Coran,” Lance said, fatigue beginning to show through in his voice. “How’s it looking up there?”

Coran was silent for a moment, and then he breathed out. “All clear. Haggar’s fleet is out of the picture. She just took her command ship through a wormhole.”

“Good.” Lance’s voice trembled. “Good. Hunk and I are grabbing the fried lions, and then we’re on our way back. Keith should be there soon with Shiro and Allura. They… They’re going to need cryopods. Pidge, too.”

“I’ll have them ready,” Coran said, his voice soft.

Ryner closed her eyes, leaning back against the wall, feeling Pidge’s weight in her lap. _We did it,_ she thought, incredulous. _We_ _got them back._

All that was left was to wait, and to hope.


	23. The Calm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... The Black Lion was attacking Arus, and the paladins rushed to stop their friends. After a long, hard battle, they emerged victorious, reclaiming Shiro, Allura, and the Black Lion--but only after Matt cut off Shiro's cybernetic arm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Brief, mild/moderate gore in a flashback (re: Matt fixating on cutting off Shiro’s arm.) Skip the italicized section after “He didn’t want this” if gore's not your thing. You can jump in again at "Matt pressed the heels of his hands to his temples."

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  Entry –  
>  Dated –**
> 
> **Pidge’s Notes:** Well, quiznak.
> 
> I figured it out. Too late for it to do us any _good,_  but I figured it out. The “override chip”… Turns out our translation really _was_ faulty. I guess that’s what we get for sticking two amateurs and a shoddy Google Translate knockoff on the project, though to be fair I don’t think anyone expected us to have to trace the etymology of a word to figure out what the hell Zarkon was up to.
> 
> It was Allura who helped us figure it out, actually. “Override chip” works fine as a literal translation, though I think “master key” would be a better English approximation. The actual phrase, in Galran, is _bet ve ara,_  which we’re now about ninety percent sure is a derived form of the Old Galran _betvarad,_  which (thank you Allura) was the Galran transliteration of the _Altean_ word… bayard.
> 
> Shiro’s arm was a bayard. A shitty, evil re-imagining of a bayard, but, well, Zarkon’s a shitty, evil re-imagining of a paladin. I guess it fits. Even more so now that Allura’s told us how Zarkon used to use his bayard to control the Black Lion, forcing her to do what he wanted even when it went against everything she stands for.
> 
> I haven’t had a chance to dig into the technical side of things, so I can’t say whether the arm was literally a bayard or just inspired by one. I mean, I guess Haggar could have used the black bayard as a reference, since Zarkon still has possession of it. (Which is a way scarier thought now that I’ve seen what Haggar’s version did to Shiro and Allura.) Anyway, I’ve looked at my bayard, and there’s not much there in the way of inner workings. I used to think it was some kind of Altean magic, but lately I’ve been wondering: what if the bayards are multidimensional? What if when we summon them, or activate all their various forms, we’re not changing them, just… revealing a different side of them, like a massively complex cootie-catcher? What if Shiro’s arm, then, was also multidimensional?
> 
> It would make sense. The fragmented code. The way the schematics seemed to be missing the stuff that would let the arm move… We were only looking at one side of the Rubik’s cube and wondering why the colors didn’t match up. Green was right. The problem was wrong, and nothing we did could have solved any of our problems unless we’d somehow figured out a way to access those other facets of the arm.
> 
> It’s a moot point now, of course. A couple hours after the battle on Arus, Coran retrieved the arm and ejected it into Arus’s sun. It’s gone now, and Haggar can’t use it to hurt anyone else.

* * *

There was so much blood.

It stained the floor of the Red Lion’s cockpit, streaked the front of Matt’s armor. Keith’s skin itched with it as he lifted Shiro’s limp body from the spot where Matt had been sitting with him. Lance had tied a tourniquet around what was left of Shiro’s arm before he left, and Matt was holding wads of clothing—strips cut from his undersuit, Keith thought—against the wound. Keith couldn’t tell how much good it was doing.

Shiro was so pale.

Keith ran faster, ignoring the tremor that had taken up residence in his chest, ignoring the ache in his limbs from too much fighting in too short a time. The others were behind him somewhere, Shay carrying Allura, Ryner with Pidge. He’d heard their footsteps behind him in the hangar, but neither had been fast enough to catch the elevator as it whisked Keith away.

When the door opened, he waited only long enough to avoid hitting Shiro’s head as he squeezed through, then took off at a sprint.

Coran was there when Keith burst through the med bay doors, ushering him toward a waiting pod and helping him to get Shiro settled. Coran looked older than he ever had, his eyes tight as he checked the settings on Shiro’s pod, then raced to the center console.

“Still alive,” Coran said. His hand shook, and his eyes fluttered closed for a moment while Keith, feeling numb, leaned his forehead against the cool glass front of the pod. He closed his eyes, not wanting to see Shiro like this—bloodied, gaunt, dressed in the same armor he’d worn for three months before they finally left Zarkon’s army.

“Is he going to be okay?”

Coran was quiet for a few seconds. Long enough for tension to creep back into Keith’s shoulders. He kept going back to that single, horrifying moment. It was frozen inside his head like a hologram: Lance hanging in open air, clinging to Keith's wrist. Shiro’s eyes blazing as he bore down on them, ready to end it. Lance’s shout to let him fall. Keith frozen, staring into the face of his greatest failure.

He should have been able to save Shiro. He should have been stronger, faster.

And still a part of him was glad he hadn't had to do it. A part of him was glad he hadn't had to own up to the fact that he solved every problem with violence, just like every other Galra in Zarkon's army.

There was a difference, of course. But it didn't matter. Faced with the prospect of hurting his best friend, Keith _didn't want to fight._ So Matt had done what Keith should have been able to, and now Shiro was...

“I think he’s going to be okay,” Coran said. “He’s lost a lot of blood, and Haggar’s magic did a number on his Quintessence; he’ll probably need a few days in the cryopod. But he _will_ recover.”

Keith’s knees went weak, and he turned around, sliding down the pod casing until he was sitting near Shiro’s feet, the room spinning around him. Shiro was alive. Shiro was going to be okay. “And she’s out?” he asked, voice hoarse. “She’s not controlling him anymore?”

“I don’t see how she could be. We won’t know for sure until he wakes up, but if Haggar _is_ still in there somehow, we’ll figure it out. We have them here; that’s the important part.”

Keith nodded, looking up as Shay and Ryner appeared in the doorway. The next few minutes were a bustle of activity as Coran got Allura and Pidge settled in their pods. Lance and Hunk joined the cacophony at some point, asking questions, jostling for positions near the pods. Keith listened to it all, but he was spent, too drained to even move out of the way as the others came one by one to see for themselves that Shiro was here, and that he was breathing.

“Moderate physical wounds,” Coran said, scrolling through a chart. Allura’s, Keith thought, though he’d kind of zoned out when the others were talking about it. “The same Quintessential strain Shiro has—Haggar’s doing, I’m sure. But she’ll be out within a day. Pidge is in even better shape.” Allura’s chart winked out, a new one taking its place. “They don’t appear to have any injuries. No signs of Quintessential strain, either.”

“It’s mental stress, I would imagine,” Ryner said. “The attack that knocked them out came through the paladin bond.”

Coran nodded. “The pod needs a few more ticks to complete the diagnostic, but unless something else crops up, they should be fine with a good night’s rest.”

“Wouldn’t _that_ be something,” Lance muttered dropping down beside Keith with an _oof_. He turned, flashing a lopsided smile that made something in Keith's chest flutter. “Can you believe we actually pulled this off?”

Keith leaned his head back, letting the news wash over him again. It still didn’t quite feel real, but it was getting there, a little more every time someone said the words. He pressed his hand against the side of the pod, reminding himself that Shiro was inside. “You’re sure Haggar was getting to him through his arm?”

“Positive.” Lance slung an arm around Keith’s shoulders and poked him in the ribs. “What gives, man? You didn’t have a problem with my plan before.”

“Yeah.” Keith relaxed, leaning a little more heavily on Lance. He was right; Keith might have charged into this fight without paying much mind to the alternatives, but that didn’t mean the others were the same. Lance had thought this through. He’d have known if there was any other way Haggar could have taken Shiro.

Oddly, knowing that Lance was so confident was enough to make Keith relax. He turned, smiling at Lance, who seemed surprised.

“Thanks,” Keith said. “I couldn’t have brought him back without you.”

It was exhaustion that made him speak—exhaustion and genuine gratitude, and he felt a spur of satisfaction as Lance’s face lit up. "And without you," he said wryly, "I'd be dead at the bottom of a cliff, so I think we're even."

Keith shuddered, closing his eyes and letting himself take in Lance's presence beside him--real, warm, alive. He couldn't stop thinking about the instant before Lance passed the edge of the cliff. The horror in his eyes as he realized what was happening. The way his fingers dug into Keith's wrists even as he told Keith to let go.

"You okay?" Lance asked.

"Fine." Keith breathed out, opened his eyes, and drank in the sight of him there--armor battered and stained with dirt, grass, and blood; sweaty hair plastered to his head, blue eyes bright with triumph. A smile tugged at Keith's lips. "I'm doing just fine."

They slumped against the pod as Coran barked out orders. He needed to speak with the Arusian king, but as soon as things were settled, Team Voltron was going into hiding. They all needed rest, he said, and most of them would need some time in the cryopods. Ryner, it seemed, was already taking stock of everyone’s injuries to set up a rotation.

Keith left her to it. He was bruised and sore, and his ribs ached from one of Shiro’s blows, but it was nothing that would leave a mark, and he could bear the pain for a day if he needed to. It was enough knowing Shiro and Allura were back on the Castle of Lions where they belonged.

He stiffened suddenly, eyes flickering across the room.

“What is it?” Lance asked through a yawn.

Keith hesitated, unease curling in his gut. “Matt," he said. "He's not here.”

* * *

_Someone had poured acid on Matt’s leg. That’s what it felt like, anyway—a hot, burning sensation that spread until his skin seemed to be made of nothing but heat and pain. He was barely aware of the floor beneath him, the hands pressing his shoulders down into the dust and the bits of loose plaster._

_He looked up into Shiro’s face, fear and confusion and a hurt that had nothing to do with his leg churning in his gut._

_New lines appeared at the corners of Shiro’s eyes._ (Guilt, Matt realized now. That was guilt.) Shiro tried _to smile, but all he managed was something like a grimace._

“ _Take care of your father.”_

Matt hugged his knees closer, burying his face in the darkness. He’d discarded his helmet at some point, but kept the rest of his armor. It smelled of blood, and Matt’s stomach turned.

He didn’t want this.

_His blade bit again into Shiro’s arm. It wasn’t the first time he’d cut flesh, or even bone. He’d felt that particular resistance before, and sometimes it even had the power to make him sick._

_This was infinitely worse. This was Shiro’s blood spraying across the white of his armor, disappearing into the red. This was Shiro’s arm falling to the grass, singeing the blades where it landed. This was Shiro's bone and Shiro's flesh glistening red in the sunlight._

_This was Shiro, staring at him for a fraction of a second. The yellow glow of Haggar’s control had faded, but he hadn’t yet passed out. Not quite. He held on just long enough to pin Matt with that same look of pain and confusion Matt knew he himself had worn outside the Arena so long ago._

Matt pressed the heels of his hands to his temples, trying to squeeze the images from his head. He’d moved past the Arena a long time ago. Him and Shiro both. Shiro had only been doing what he had to to save Matt—and Matt had done the same. It hurt, but it was necessary.

That didn’t stop his stomach from twisting in guilt. It didn’t stop the cold sweat dampening his neck or the tremor in the hands curling into his hair.

Was this how Shiro had felt?

“I’m sorry,” Matt whispered into his knees. From somewhere nearby, he heard the Red Lion whispering her concern, but he shut her out. He didn’t want anyone to see inside his head right now. He didn’t want anyone to know what he’d done.

It didn’t matter, of course. They already knew. Keith and Lance did, anyway, and Shiro, and if no one had yet told the others, it would only be a matter of time before the truth came out. That everyone had been ready to fight, to risk injuring Shiro and Allura, in order to get them back—that didn’t matter. _Matt_ was the one who had cut off Shiro’s arm. It didn’t matter that Shiro had already lost the arm. _Matt_ was the one with Shiro’s blood on his hands, in his mouth.

There came another rumbling—not Red this time. It was closer, and softer, and it came from outside Matt, raising the hairs along the back of his neck. He lifted his head, blinking in the lights of the main hangar. It seemed strangely empty now, and yet too crowded. The Black Lion had an alcove at the back, the same place where she’d slept behind her shield until the other four lions came to free her.

She wasn’t there now, of course. Yellow and Blue had set her down, still entangled with Green, in the center of the main space, not far from where Keith had landed Red. Everyone else had rushed off to the pod room, but Matt had lingered inside Red, sitting in a pool of Shiro’s blood, his head filled up with memories that refused to fade.

He’d left at some point, intending to go after the others. (He should be there, shouldn’t he? He should make sure Shiro and Allura were all right. And Pidge. Hadn’t Ryner been carrying Pidge? He couldn’t seem to remember what had happened to them.)

But Matt’s feet had carried him the wrong direction, and he’d finally collapsed in the shadow of the Black Lion.

He looked up at her now. She remained halfway through the Voltron transformation, the Green Lion attached to her shoulder but both of them otherwise still mostly lion-like. Green's front paws stretched out before her like she was reaching toward the elevator where her paladins had disappeared. Black's tail lashed behind her, the scrape of metal against the floor light enough to give Matt goosebumps. Black’s eyes were glowing, too—a change from when Matt first collapsed. Black and Green had both seemed utterly lifeless then.

Black purred again, still weak. Red relayed the Black Lion’s sorrow, and Matt felt it even through the walls he’d thrown up inside his own mind.

His vision blurred, and he cursed as his tears spilled over. “I’m sorry,” he whispered again. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt him.” No, that wasn’t right. He _had_ meant to cut off Shiro’s arm. He'd known exactly what he was doing. But he hadn’t _wanted_ to do it. “I—I--” Matt’s breath came in a hiccuping gasp, and he curled forward, head between his knees, hair brushing the floor. He was going to be sick. He was going to pass out. He wanted all this to be over.

“Matt!”

Matt tensed at the sound of Keith’s voice, blinking furiously in a desperate attempt to stop his tears. He didn’t want Keith to see him like this. He didn’t want to be the small, scared, helpless boy Shiro had needed to save from the Arena.

But the sobs kept tearing out of him, tumbling over each other, clawing at his throat until his whole body shook with the force of them. Keith’s footsteps approached at something near to a sprint, but he stopped shy of touching Matt.

“It’s okay,” Keith said, his voice faltering. Through the tears, Matt saw his ears droop. He was worried about Matt. Great. “It’s okay, Matt. They’re going to be okay.”

Something Matt hadn’t recognized, which had been coiled tight in his chest, suddenly went slack, but that only made the other half of his tension that much harder to bear. Keith’s hand came to rest on his shoulder, tentative at first, then more solidly. After a moment, he tugged Matt toward him, and that was all it took for Matt to crumble.

He fell against Keith, the tears falling freely, and squeezed so tight he almost expected to hear something crack. Some part of him—the part that still had enough self-awareness to be ashamed of his tears—felt Keith tense. He wasn’t overly fond of touch, Matt knew, and his rare hugs were short-lived and deliberate.

This was the complete opposite. It was messy and clinging, and Matt didn’t think he would be able to pry himself away until he’d cried his eyes dry. He shouldn’t be doing this; not to Keith.

But Keith was _here_ , and he’d offered, and he made no move to pull away.

A few minutes passed, and slowly Matt calmed himself enough to sit back. A few tears still fell from bleary eyes, but it was less than what it had been, the pain not quite as heavy. Keith remained where he was, looking awkward, rubbing the edge of his ear self-consciously.

“Sorry,” Matt said.

Keith shook his head. “It’s been a rough couple of days.”

Matt laughed tearfully, and nodded. “We did it, though.”

“Thanks to you,” Keith said. Matt wanted to argue, wanted to say that he didn’t deserve any credit for saving Shiro when he’d had to dismember him to do so. But Keith wasn’t done yet. “You shouldn’t have had to do it. Lance told me the plan, said he was going to cut off Shiro’s arm, said it was the only thing that would work. But he’s not a melee fighter, so I told him I’d do it, and then…”

Matt sighed, staring at the ground between them. “We have Shiro back. That’s all that matters.” _God,_ he hoped that was all that mattered. He didn’t think he’d be able to stand it if Shiro hated him after this.

As if reading his mind, Keith leaned forward. “Shiro was ready to let us kill him to stop Haggar,” he said. “If he’s upset about losing his arm again, it’ll only be because it means one of us had to do it.”

Matt snorted, wiping away a stray tears. “You’re probably not far off.”

“Of course not,” Keith said. “I know him almost as well as you do. He’ll know it had to be done.”

Matt nodded, clinging to Keith’s words. He knew Keith was right. He knew Shiro wouldn’t hate him for this— _Shiro_ , who’d attacked Matt to save him. He’d understand. Hell, he’d probably try to comfort _Matt._

It did little to assuage Matt’s guilt. Necessary or no, better than the alternatives or no, Matt had still attacked Shiro, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to forget that fact anytime soon. “I just...” Matt paused, blowing out a shaky breath as tears threatened anew. “I wish there was some way I could build him a new one.”

“A new prosthetic?” Keith asked. Matt nodded. “Why can’t you?”

Matt crossed his arms on his knees. “I mean, I _can_. I will, probably.” He’d need something to keep him busy from now until whenever Shiro emerged from his pod. “But it’s not going to be anywhere near as good as what Haggar gave him. Well, not _good_.” Matt curled his lip, thinking of that god-awful piece of shit. “But it won’t be as advanced. We’ve barely even _begun_ to figure out how that thing worked; I’m going to have to go back to Earth tech for this, and Earth tech is...”

Matt trailed off, and the slope of Keith’s ears said he understood.

The Black Lion rumbled again, the sound taking up residence in Matt’s chest. It was a comforting sound, like she was trying to reassure him. _It will be all right,_ that purr said. Keith jumped halfway out of his skin, and Matt turned to see what had spooked him.

He found himself staring into the Black Lion’s eyes as she lowered her head to the ground, her mouth opening, ramp extending to within a few inches of him.

Frowning, Matt stared up at her, but Red was prodding at him to listen and so, feeling out of place, Matt stood and walked up the ramp into the Black Lion’s cockpit.

* * *

The next twenty-four hours passed in something of a blur, which Lance figured was mostly because he (along with all the other paladins) was well over the edge into exhaustion. Pidge came out of the pod around the time Keith returned from talking to Matt—Matt wasn’t there because, according to Keith, “something came up.” Whatever that meant.

Pidge maintained a kind of muddled consciousness long enough for Shay to ask them a few questions. Once she cleared them, they curled up on a bed in the infirmary and fell asleep. Lance knew it was good, knew Pidge _needed_ the sleep, but he couldn’t help worrying just a little at how easy it had been to convince them to let go.

It was almost a relief when Ryner ushered him into a cryopod first. He and Shay, who was preparing her own pod beside Lance’s, had taken the worst beatings of anyone, probably because they’d both tried to front-line a fight against the black paladins with less than a day’s practice. Shay had two broken bones (she was pretty sure the third was just bruised) and a lump on her head, which was even more terrifying. Lance didn’t want to think about what kind of blow it took to give a Balmeran a goose egg through a helmet.

Lance was a little better off, since he’d switched back to his rifle when he needed to, but one of Shiro’s kicks had connected with his gut. Where most of his other pains had dulled to something closer to a whisper after the fight, his stomach continued to throb every time he moved. Someone had brought up the possibility of internal bleeding, ruptured organs, and all those lovelythings, and then there was no going back. Lance was halfway convinced Keith was going to throw him bodily into the cryopod if he kept insisting he was fine.

If nothing else, the pod helped him shut down his brain for a while, and when he emerged he felt a little less like everything was waiting to kill him. Keith had already replaced Shay in her pod, and apparently Hunk and Ryner’s bruises were minor enough that they’d opted for a liberal application of Altean pain-relieving gel over a stint in the cryopods. Lance didn’t blame them. Hunk had once mentioned that he was worried about getting too dependent on the cryopods, and Lance didn't think anyone was thrilled at how easy it was to loose a few days to the pods. Or ten thousand years.

“Matt says he’s fine, too,” Ryner said, checking the progress of Keith’s cycle. “I’d feel better if anyone but Keith had actually _seen_ him since the battle, but I suppose there’s nothing to be done.”

“He’s still MIA?” Lance asked.

Ryner shook her head. “He needs space, and I’m inclined to give it to him. He watched Haggar take his boyfriend, fought him, nearly _died_ , then emerged from stasis and charged right back into battle—all, from his point of view, within about four hours.”

“He needs time to process,” Lance said, nodding.

“We all do.” Ryner gave a tired smile. “Coran and I spoke with the Arusians. A few villages were hit in the attack, but the death toll is smaller than I would have expected.”

Lance felt himself grow cold. Death toll. So Haggar had managed to use Shiro and Allura to kill people. Innocent people. Lance hoped they never found out about that. “What about Haggar?”

“She fled.”

“Because we took Shiro and Allura back?”

Ryner stepped back from the controls, crossing her arms over her chest. “In part, yes. But from what I hear, Wyn manifested some technopathic abilities during the battle. It… frightened Haggar.”

“Technopathy? What, like yours?”

“Stronger,” Ryner said. “Far stronger. Coran says he took control of most of the sentries in Haggar’s fleet, turned the fighters against the other ships. He decimated Haggar’s forces single-handedly.”

“ _Wyn_ did?” Lance ran a hand through his hair, head reeling. “Is he okay?”

Ryner rubbed the bridge of her nose, her antennae drooping. “Physically, yes. He’s tired, but there don’t seem to be any other lasting effects. I’m not sure about emotionally. He hasn’t let Coran’s side for the last few hours. I don't think he's said a word, either."

Shaking his head, Lance let that sink in. He’d have to track Wyn down later, make sure he was okay. “Where are they now?”

“Working on repairs. I’m not sure exactly where. Coran had a list of things that need to be fixed right away.” Ryner’s smile turned wry. “I don’t think he intends to sleep until they’re all complete. That man… Hunk’s helping him, and I was just about to head that way. We’ll see if we can convince him to sleep before he drops dead from exhaustion.”

Lance smiled. “Good luck with that.”

“Mm.” Ryner switched off the display and turned for the door. “Last I knew, Shay was watching over Pidge in the rec room. I’m sure the both of them could use some company.”

Lance nodded, but before he could leave the room, Ryner’s hand came down on his shoulder.

“Lance?”

He turned, tilting his head in a silent question.

Ryner smiled. “Good work out there today. You should be proud.”

Lance was too tired for pride, but Ryner’s words did kindle something warm inside him. They’d done it. They’d brought Shiro and Allura back. Lance wouldn’t pretend it had been all his doing, or even _mostly_ his doing. Matt and Pidge had made the biggest difference, and it was Keith and Shay who’d held the defenses long enough for Matt to get there.

But it had been Lance’s idea that clinched it, and none of Lance’s other decisions had led them to disaster. Not bad for his first command.

With one last glance at Shiro and Allura— _here_ and _safe_ and _free_ (they had to be free. They _had_ to be.)--Lance parted ways with Ryner and headed up to the rec room. As Ryner had said, Pidge and Shay were already here, Pidge dozing in a mound of blankets, Shay curled up nearby, a tablet in her hand.

She looked up as Lance entered and beamed. “You are feeling well?”

“Great!” Lance chirped, plopping down beside her so he was pressed up against Pidge’s nest. They groaned, burrowing deeper into the blankets, and Lance smiled. “Looks like the munchkin’s doing good too, hmm?”

Pidge muttered something that sounded vaguely rude, sat up to try to push his face away, lost their balance, and ended up sprawling across his lap. They huffed, then gave up, grabbed a pillow to tuck beneath their head, and turned their face into his stomach.

“You’re my blackout curtains now,” they muttered, as though that were a totally normal thing to say to a person.

Lance just chuckled, resting his hand on top of their head the way he did when Luz or Mateo used him as a pillow. He could feel the tension draining out of Pidge minute by minute—all the pressure of the last two days melting off them. They breathed in deep, then let it out.

Looking up, Lance found Shay looking at him, her expression fond. “You are a sibling,” she said. “Hunk has told me this.”

Lance let his head rest against the back of the couch. “Yeah. Oldest of three. They’re both younger than Pidge, but after a while certain things just become habit.”

“Yes. My brother says much the same.”

Lance draped his free hand along the couch behind Shay’s shoulders. “You two cuddle a lot?”

With a giggle, Shay shook her head. “We are Balmeran,” she said. “We do not cuddle the way you humans do.” She shook her head, her head ornaments clacking softly. “However, Rax claimed it was his habits as a brother that made him wish I could stay.”

Well, Lance could understand that. He didn’t know how Matt stood it, honestly, knowing Pidge was out here fighting the Galra same as him. “Bet you’re starting to wish you’d listened to him, huh?”

“Not at all.” Shay had her feet pulled up on the couch cushion, and she laid her head atop her knees, turned to look at him. “What we do is hard, but it is worth it. And anyway, you all would still be here even if I had not come. I could not wish I had left you to face today without me.”

Lance smiled. “Yeah, well we’re all certainly lucky we’ve got you around.” He looped his arm around her neck and pulled her into a hug, laughing when Pidge protested the jostling with a drawn-out wordless moan.

“Look at you,” Keith said suddenly from the door. Lance turned (jostling Pidge again and getting a knuckle in his side for his trouble) to find Keith watching him with his arms crossed, his ears quivering with amusement. “I think that charm you’re always bragging about finally decided to show its ugly face. You’ve got cute aliens falling all over you.”

“Jealous?” Lance asked, fluttering his eyelashes in Keith’s direction.

Keith snorted, then finally moved from the doorway. “Hardly,” he said, stepping over the back of the couch to sit by Pidge’s feet. They nudged him a few times with their toes, which Lance took as some kind of weird greeting. Keith didn’t miss a beat, just ran his claw lightly along the arch of their foot.

Pidge yelped, jerking violently to get away from the tickling. They managed to elbow Lance in the teeth, kick Keith in the gut, and spill half their blanket nest onto the floor, all in one wild, flailing instant. Lance groaned, running his tongue over his teeth, as Pidge flung their pillow at Keith.

“Rude,” they muttered.

Keith smirked.

Grumbling, Pidge wrapped themself up in a blanket and huddled against Lance’s side, shooting a suspicious look toward Keith. Lance preened, making sure Keith saw that Lance had won this particular battle. (Keith noticed. He also seemed to find Lance’s victory more amusing than humiliating, which just wouldn’t do.)

Keith glanced down at Pidge, who seemed to be halfway back into oblivion. “So, what, are we just crashing here tonight?”

“Works for me,” Lance said, stretching his legs out in front of him. “Allura’s gonna be waking up in, like, twelve hours. I’m good with just veging until then.”

“And Coran says we should not encounter any Galra patrols while we remain here," Shay added.

“Perfect!” Lance pumped his hands in the air, then let them fall back as a yawn overtook him. “It’s about time we took a vacation.”

Pidge snorted, nuzzling into Lance’s side. “If this is a vacation, does that mean we have to do road trip games?”

Lance grinned at Keith, who’d faceplanted in the remainders of Pidge’s nest, curling in on himself like a fluffy, overgrown baby. “I spy with my little eye something adorable.”

Pidge followed his line of sight, lips quirking upward. “Is it Keith in the fetal position?”

“Hell yeah it is.”

Keith growled deep in his throat, but made no effort to move.

Before Lance could make the obvious joke about purring aliens, Pidge brought their fist down on his kneecap. He yelped, rubbing his new bruise.

“Slug bug,” they muttered.

“Slug bug?” Lance flicked the top of their head. “We’re on a space ship, Pidge. Where the heck are you seeing cars?”

“In my head,” they said cheekily. “I’ve got a very active imagination, you know.”

Lance snorted, then pinched their arm. “I just had a very vivid waking dream about a pincher bug,” he said, when Pidge lifted their head to glare at him. The staring contest lasted all of three seconds before they devolved into a knot of flailing limbs and pinches that didn’t quite find their mark. Lance was pretty sure Pidge bit him at one point, but he was _absolutely_ sure he’d never be able to prove it.

Shay watched, her ear still resting atop her knees. “Is this… normal? For humans?”

“For human siblings?” Lance asked. “It’s practically required.”

Pidge snickered—right up until Lance twisted, carrying both of them off the couch and onto the floor, where Lance landed on Pidge’s legs. He propped his chin on his hands and smiled at Pidge as they tried to shove him off.

Keith had scooted to the edge of the couch, his luminous eyes peering over the folds of blankets at the wrestling match happening below him. Seeing that Lance had noticed him, Keith smiled. His mouth was buried in the blankets, but the smile showed in the way his eyes creased at the corners and the way his ears turned forward. (Well, _ear_. The other one was smushed between his head and the blankets.)

“You two are so weird.”

Lance glanced down at Pidge, who had abruptly stopped fighting against his weight. They grinned, Lance returned the expression, and as one, both surged toward Keith, grabbed his arms, and dragged him off the couch onto the floor with them. He gave an undignified yelp as he fell, but it cut off as Pidge leaped on him.

Lance left them to it, grinning as Keith shot a glare his way. Pointedly ignoring Keith’s profanity-laden plea for help, Lance turned to Shay.

“You should tell Hunk we’re doing an impromptu sleepover up here. He’s gonna want to get in on this.”

Shay furrowed her brow. “Tell Hunk?”

Lance leaned back on his hands. “You’re texting him, aren’t you?” he asked. Shay glanced down at her tablet, ducking her head. Lance grinned. “Tell him to come crash with us once he’s done with whatever project he’s working on now. Coran and Ryner, too. Anything that’s not going to explode in the next six-to-eight hours can wait for morning. We’ll all help out.”

Shay, still steaming with embarrassment, passed the message along, and half an hour later—Pidge and Keith passed out on opposite sides of a wall of pillows, Shay curled up on the couch reading, Lance lying in the center of it all, listening to the others breathe—Hunk stumbled in. The others weren’t with him; Coran had wanted to keep an eye on Wyn, and Ryner was staying in the pod room to monitor Shiro and Allura.

That was fine. Hunk yawned, flopped down beside Lance, and was snoring before Lance could find a comfortable way to use him as a pillow. Coran and Ryner (and Wyn and Shiro and Allura and, hell, the Galra refugees for that matter) would all have a chance to get in on this. Lance had a feeling there were going to be a lot more sleepovers in the near future.

* * *

Iverson wanted to hit something.

“You’re drawing too much attention to yourself,” Vanda hissed. “Weren’t you the one who wanted to avoid an outright invasion?”

Gritting his teeth, Iverson strained for calm. “The paladins’ families are proving more tenacious than anticipated.” That was an understatement. They’d released video of last night’s protest. Of course they had. Iverson had hoped the cameraman he’d heard about hadn’t been Karen’s crony, but he’d long since learned not to hope for the best where Karen Holt was involved.

Vanda crossed her arms, claw tapping impatiently on her arm. “It seems to me all your troubles can be traced back to those three. You should have eliminated them from the start. Sent them up here with the girl."

“It would have been too suspicious,” Iverson growled. They’d had this argument before, of course. Iverson had figured it was all part of Vanda’s persistent attempt to back him into a full-scale invasion scenario. She was tired of all this sneaking around.

 _Yeah, well she’d just as soon watched the whole damn planet burn._ As long as she got her test subjects, she didn’t care how many people died in pointless battles. Iverson was the only one here looking out for the humans lucky enough to get passed over for Project Balmera.

“It doesn’t matter,” Iverson said. “They’ve put themselves too much in the spotlight. I can’t touch them now. Not without ruining everything else.”

“I thought you didn’t care what Karen Holt's little band of crusaders thought of you.” Vanda was sneering openly now, and not for the first time, Iverson wondered if something had happened. She seemed more on edge lately. He’d feared her superiors were putting pressure on her, that the stealth option might soon be taken off the table, but when he’d asked she’d said it was a minor issue with one of the prisoners. Nothing to worry about. She had the matter well in hand.

“I don’t care what _they_ think of me,” Iverson said. “I care that they’ve captured the attention of half the country. I can’t do anything that would make more people turn against me. I can’t risk an outside investigation.”

Vanda’s scoff said she cared little for U.S. politics. “Do what you want, Iverson. But know I won’t be swooping in to save you if this scheme of yours backfires.”

As if he could forget that. He hadn’t asked to have aliens land on his planet. He hadn’t asked for his base to happen to sit atop the one thing the Galra needed. He was just doing his best to carve out a bit of leverage for himself and his species. If he had to burn a few innocents to hold onto that leverage, so be it.

“You’ll have the next group of prisoners by the end of the week,” he said, then ended the transmission. He slumped forward, rubbing his temples to stave off a headache. Maybe Vanda was right. Maybe the risk of moving against Karen and her people was worth it to keep them from ruining his plans. Ruining them more than they already had.

Groaning, Iverson sent a short message to his inner circle.  _Tonight. 2100 hours. Code Rainbow._

* * *

The first thing Allura knew was gravity reasserting its authority. Her legs (if she had legs; she couldn’t feel them just now) were unprepared to take her weight and so she toppled, the freezing cold making itself known as she fell.

Someone caught her, and her first thought was, _Shiro._

“You’re all right. You’re all right now.”

Coran’s voice washed over her, shoving her bodily into the present. She wasn’t on Haggar’s ship. She wasn’t trapped inside the Black Lion’s spirit, watching helplessly as, once again, she was used to slaughter innocents.

The tears came quickly, bursting out of her before she could fully process where she was and what must have happened. She caught a glimpse of the cryopod room on the Castle of Lions, a ring of familiar faces—few of them dry-eyed—watching her from a few paces away. Then Coran pulled her close, guiding her head to his shoulder.

“You’re safe now. We’ve got you.”

Allura strained for serenity. She’d trained her entire life to keep up appearances, to wear a mask, to stay in control. She should be able to do so now. But she felt gutted, her body hollowed out and stuffed full of clay. Nothing fit quite right, like Haggar had stretched her out somehow. Even Coran’s hand on her back, warm and solid, seemed unreal. The tears on her face felt too hot, the air in her lungs too stale.

Coran was still speaking, a jumble of reassurances and urges to breathe that were almost lost in his own tears.

His hand cupped the back of her neck, and the way his fingers shook finally broke through her detachment to tell her, _yes,_  this was real. _She_ was real. She was home.

She took another shuddering breath, then lifted her head, searching Coran’s face for answers. What had happened? How had they brought her back? What had happened to Shiro? Why hadn’t Matt been with Keith in the Red Lion during the battle? Surely he couldn’t be…

She saw pain in Coran’s eyes, but she didn’t think it was the pain of recent tragedy. It was the pain of relief that was altogether too keen. Relief that hit you like a rampaging yelmore and knocked you flat.

She felt a little of that relieved ache herself.

“Shiro?” she asked, her voice hardly more than a breath.

Coran’s eyes darted over Allura’s shoulder and she turned, finding a second cryopod still active. Shiro slept within, his face serene. His right arm ended abruptly several inches above the elbow. Allura wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Part of her ached for another trauma added to a list that was already far too long. Another part of her felt almost happy—happiness chased by guilt—that it was only his arm he’d lost. They hadn’t had to kill him. They hadn’t paid with his life to save her.

Mostly, though, she was too numb to feel much of anything.

“You… probably don’t remember what happened,” Coran said haltingly. He clearly wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to ask the question.

“I remember some,” she said simply, not yet ready to explain how the Black Lion had taken Allura and Shiro into herself, how the three of them together had strained to turn the attacks away from populated areas. How they’d only marginally succeeded. Instead, she turned her gaze to the faces watching her. “Is everyone all right? Keith? Matt?”

“We’re fine,” Keith said, drawing Allura’s gaze to him. He stood at the back of the group, leaning against the wall by the door. “Matt, too. We’re not that easy to take down.”

Allura nodded, letting go of that worry. They were alive. Shiro hadn’t killed them—either of them. That was one less nightmare for her to hold at bay. It should have been a relief, letting it go, but its absence only seemed to make the ache inside her spread. This was an ache the healing pod couldn’t touch, as it had no physical component. It was the ache left over from dark hours and darker dreams, from watching her own body rain destruction upon Arus, from hearing the anguish in her friends’ voices as they came for her.

There were other things that needed to be asked, she knew. Had they recovered the Black Lion? Had the castle been damaged? What had happened to Haggar and her army? Was Arus safe? Were the paladins? How long had she spent in the pod? How long had the others spent in pods, erasing the signs of whatever wounds she might have given them, as Allura had tried to erase Shiro’s handprint on her neck?

She found it too great a burden to form these questions into words, so she stored them for later. She kept hold of Coran with one hand, as much to steady herself as to remind him that she was (going to be) okay, and turned toward the others. She could tell they were waiting, that they needed to assure themselves that she was okay.

It wasn’t until they closed in, Hunk at the lead wrapping her in a warm, careful embrace, that she realized how much she needed this, too. They all joined the circle: Hunk in front of her, Lance behind, Pidge wedged between them, arms locked tight around Allura’s waist. There wasn’t room for Ryner and Shay to hold her, but they reached out, a warm, heavy hand on her shoulder; cool, slender fingers splayed against her back.

Even Keith was there, touching her arm and watching her with sad, worried eyes.

For a few minutes, Allura focused only on breathing.

She was here. She was safe. There was no reason to feel as if she had lost a piece of herself. No reason at all.

Eventually Allura pulled herself together, straightening up at the center of the knot of limbs. The others fell away one by one until it was only Coran still holding onto her, one hand at her waist, the other on her arm. He seemed to expect her to collapse at any moment, and truth be told there was a part of her that wanted to do just that.

She didn’t let herself waver. She breathed deeply, wiping the tears from her face, and looked around. “What needs to be done?”

Lance pursed his lips. “Dinner? Relaxation? We kinda took over the rec room last night, so there’s plenty of snacks and games and things down there.”

“No,” Allura said. “I meant more urgent matters. Is the castle in need of repairs? What are the Galra up to? How are our supplies?” She turned to Coran, narrowing her eyes. “When did you last sleep? I can take a shift on the bridge.”

Coran smiled faintly, turning her toward him and settling his hands on her shoulders. “Everything is under control, Allura. Zelka’s heading up repairs, and we’ve retreated to a quiet system, so we can all afford to relax for a few days. Until you and Shiro are back to full health, we’re staying out of trouble.”

“Seriously, Allura,” Pidge said, crossing their arms. “You don’t need to worry about anything.”

“You’ve been through quite enough already, I should think,” Ryner added. “Take it easy for a few days.”

Take it easy. Allura stared at Ryner, her mind sticking on the words. Take it _easy?_  With Haggar out there slaughtering innocents? With prisoners like the Altean boy Lance had found, prisoners like Shiro, like Allura, still in Haggar’s clutches, being turned into weapons? With Zarkon crushing whole worlds beneath his foot?

She couldn’t rest. There was too much to do. If they were staying put for a few days, all the better. It would give her time to plan, time to figure out their next steps. She could head up to the bridge, pull intel from the castle’s systems to figure out what Zarkon was planning. She could get in touch with Anamuri and their other allies—the Olkari, the Balmerans… She could… She could…

Allura shook her head, forcing a smile for Coran as she stepped away from him. She didn’t know what else she could do, but she would figure it out. She had no choice. Momentum would keep her going. If she slowed, she would collapse. More than simply collapse. There was a black hole inside of her; she may not be  able to outrun it forever, but she could damn well try.

“Allura?” Coran asked, frowning as she headed for the door.

She fixed her smile in place, falling back on her royal training to project a queen’s mask when she had a storm raging beneath her surface. “I’m fine, Coran.” The other paladins were watching her, concern in their eyes. It would be so easy to let them see the cracks in her skin—but she’d given herself far too much leeway already. “I’ll join you in the rec room in a while,” she said, fixing her eyes on Lance who, despite his furrowed brow, at least didn’t look at her like he expected her to shatter. “I’m going to go clean myself up first, perhaps check in on the Black Lion.”

A spike of fear gave her pause, and she shot a worried look toward Coran, afraid he would contradict her. Allura and Shiro’s bodies had taken the battle away from the lions; the paladins might easily have had to leave Black behind to save Shiro and Allura.

But Coran just smiled and nodded in understanding, and Allura, hating the way her relief made her knees weak, turned and fled the room.

Matt was waiting in the corridor, and the sight of him drew her up short. Her breath caught in her throat, and she ducked her head, feeling like a much younger child caught sneaking around after her bedtime.

They stared at each other, both silent, a current of hesitance running between them. His eyes went to the empty space around her where the others would have been if Allura hadn’t fled their suffocating sympathy like it was a stampede of wild animals. She stared at him, and then at the door waiting just a few feet to his left. Why come all this way, she wondered, and then wait outside?

“I can’t,” he whispered. “I--” He pulled off his glasses, rubbing his eyes, and when he looked up at her again, Allura suddenly registered the changes—a rash of glittering scales across the side of his face, an icy blue glow in his left eye. Her horror must have showed on her face, for he shrank back, dropping his gaze as he settled his glasses back into place. “I’m the one who cut his arm off,” he said, the words tumbling out of him. “He’s in there because of _me._  I can’t—I can’t--”

Allura threw her arms around his neck, new tears stinging her eyes. “It’s not your fault,” she whispered. “You know Shiro would never blame you for what happened.”

“He should.”

Allura closed her eyes. “He was ready to die to protect us. When he said he’d want us to kill him… he wasn’t lying. When he wakes up, he’s going to be grateful that you found a way to stop him from hurting the rest of you. He won’t care what it cost him.”

Matt sagged against her, clinging to the black undersuit she'd worn beneath the Galra armor. His shoulders were shaking, though he made no sound. “I’m sorry,” he whispered after a time. “I’m sorry, Allura. You shouldn’t have to deal with my shit. You’re the one who just went through hell.”

“We each have our own hells, Matt,” she said. Her voice remained surprisingly steady, though her mind was dragging her back toward the things she’d seen in the Black Lion’s memories. Zarkon’s anger. Alfor’s coldness. The lies, and the questions.

Shoes scuffed against the floor, and Allura pulled back to see Pidge standing in the doorway, their face screwed up in pain as they watched the scene. “I can come back,” they said, shifting awkwardly.

Matt was already shaking his head. “I’m fine. Just a little emotional today.” He managed a feeble smile. “You gonna help me work on this thing or not?”

Rather than answer, Pidge just came forward and wrapped their arms around his waist, apparently content to stay that way as they headed off. Both gave Allura a questioning look as they turned to go, but Allura only waved and headed off the opposite direction.

She had something she needed to do, and she would rather not have anyone tagging along.

* * *

Pidge didn’t try to talk to Matt, for which he was grateful. He was aware that he was a wreck, but he was holding it together. He was trying. Keith helped, and Coran. Hunk gave Matt a hug every chance he got—at breakfast, when they passed in the hall, a few hours ago when Hunk had come to lend a hand with the prosthetic Matt was piecing together. Matt craved those hugs as much as he dreaded them.

He came too close to breaking down whenever someone hugged him.

The problem was that no one could help him, not with this. He didn’t have to worry about what Haggar was doing to Shiro and Allura anymore. He wasn’t upset about the lingering effects of the rapid crystal growth, whatever Coran thought. Sure, his vision was still a little funny, and the crystal patches on his skin—which ran down his shoulder and across his back, not only along his face—itched. Sure, his knee ached so much he couldn’t walk without a brace.

It was all temporary, and relatively minor. Even the way his foot tingled sometimes as he worked, a prickling sensation on the edge of pain that inched up toward his knee and refused to go away however much he tried to work the feeling back into the limb—even that didn’t register as anything more than a minor annoyance.

No, Matt was well aware that things in the Castle of Lions were, for once, looking up. His team, his _family,_ was safe and heading toward happiness. They were still hurting, but the hurts were mending now that they had Shiro and Allura back.

There was only one thing Matt needed to let go of the panic that dogged his steps. He needed Shiro—awake and alive and himself—to tell him they were okay. Keith’s assurances had helped, Allura’s even more. Vrekt, Matt didn’t even need anyone to tell him Shiro wouldn’t hold all this against him. Shiro was better than that.

Still a corner of Matt’s mind needed to hear _Shiro_ say those words. Until he did, he couldn’t find rest. He worked on the new prosthetic with a frantic sort of drive, an obsession that left little room for other considerations. He’d dragged himself away to greet Allura when she woke up, but that was about all he could manage.

He worked now in the Black Lion’s shadow, taking comfort in her presence and the rumble of her voice against his back.

Pidge sat tucked against his side, typing away on their computer. They were the better programmer of the pair by far, and he was infinitely grateful for their help. He could design the prosthetic, draw up plans for something that could move like a real arm. He and Hunk could craft the device. But Pidge was the one who would bring it to life—Pidge and Ryner, if she ever got a break from the other tasks she was doing to help Coran around the castle.

The work was slow, but it was coming along. There was a corner of Matt’s brain that said if he could finish this, if he could make a working prosthetic by the time Shiro woke up, then everything would be okay. He wasn’t trying to turn the arm into a bribe to make Shiro forgive him (though he was, maybe, intending it as an apology gift). He just needed something tangible to make up for what he’d stolen from Shiro.

So he worked, hardly looking up from the gears and the schematics, until his eyes burned and his neck ached. He worked through the worried looks Pidge sent him, hummed vague responses to their occasional questions, and didn’t even look up when they got up for dinner.

“I’m not hungry,” Matt said. His voice was scratchy from disuse, but that helped to mask Red’s reprimand rumbling in his mind. In truth, his stomach did feel empty, but the sensation didn’t quite make it to real hunger. It was a hollow, queasy knot in his stomach, and he didn’t think he could have kept food down if he’d tried.

So Pidge left, returning a few minutes later with a bowl of food goo, a plate of fruit from Green’s hangar, and a couple of water pouches. “Just in case,” they said.

Matt stabbed the straw into the first water pouch, but left the food untouched. Something had gone wrong in the wiring of the prosthetic, making the fingers spasm every time the elbow bent. Matt would eat once he figured out how to fix that.

* * *

The bridge was deserted when Allura arrived, which saved her the trouble of explaining her presence. It felt odd to have no one on watch. The castle had of course set its AI to monitor the short- and long-range scanners, to watch for wormholes in the area, to be on alert for security breaches. But it wasn't the same. It felt too much like a time before the war.

“Computer, bring up castle diagnostics,” Allura said, striding toward the command station with its twin pedestals. It felt strange to stand here again, but she shoved her discomfort aside and scrolled through the list of checks the castle had brought up. Finding no damage in urgent need of repairs, she swiped the window to close it. “Bring up maintenance reports.”

A list of recent repairs popped up, but this, too, was nothing terribly surprising. The castle had taken a beating recently, and Coran’s crew seemed to have worked through the night to get things up and running again. The shields had been patched, the laser generators cleaned, the sensors recalibrated.

Things were not yet in perfect working order, but they were heading in a very promising direction.

“Quiznaking ship,” Allura muttered.

The hollowness was creeping in again, and the only thing holding it back was an irrational, unfocused anger that crept into every piece of her. She wanted a crisis to resolve; she wanted an enemy to defeat. She might have gone down to the training deck if she hadn’t felt a finger’s width from collapse. She’d come up here hoping to find a problem to hurl herself at, but she’d found only more of the same unsettling peace and the same creeping malaise inside her soul.

“Fine,” she said, straightening her spine. “Activate hologram interface.”

A hologram flickered and resolved in the air in front of her, her father’s blank face staring down at her in expectation. This, finally, was enough to stoke the flames of her anger, to keep her from sliding down into that dark, cold pit.

“Computer,” Allura said, fixing the hologram with a cold stare. “How wonderful to see you again.”

The hologram tilted its head to the side, blinking slowly. “You could have seen me at any time, daughter. I am always here.”

Allura’s teeth ground together, and she stepped away from the pedestals, raising a finger to jab at her father’s face. “Don’t pretend you know me,” she snapped. “Don’t pretend to be my father.”

“But I _am_ him.”

The worst part of it was she could have believed it, had she not known the truth. It looked like her father. It sounded like him. It even had his inflection right. “No,” she said. “You are _not._  You don’t have his memories. You don’t have the years we shared.”

“The castle memory banks contain records of events going back ten thousand, six hundred years. I remember you as a child, Allura. I remember training you. I watched you grow.”

Allura closed her eyes, the words shaking her. “Shut up.” The words hissed through her teeth, and she repeated them, louder. “ _Shut up._ You’re _not_ Alfor. You’re _not_ my father. Do you know how I know that?” The hologram opened its mouth to answer, but Allura talked over the top of it. “Because if you were my father, you’d already know why I came here. If you were my father, you’d be able to hold me. You’d leave one of your officers to watch the bridge, and we’d go get supper together, and you’d tell me about your day.” She balled her hands into fists, stepping forward so the hologram had to retreat several inches to keep from being distorted by her touch. “I know you’re not my father because _you_ can’t lie to me.”

The hologram looked mildly surprised by her outburst—not truly shocked, and not guilty or angry. Just startled, like she’d asked for a meal when it had expected a request for a drink.

“Allura.”

A translucent bluish hand appeared at the corner of her vision, ghosting a chill across her skin as it cupped her cheek and turned her around. Her mother stood there, brow furrowed, and Allura’s anger shattered, falling down around her like the rubble after an explosion.

Allura’s face scrunched up, but she couldn’t keep the tears from spilling over. She tried to reclaim her anger, to stand and face her father’s ghost and demand answers for the things she’d seen in the Black Lion’s memories, but the void had consumed her rage. All that was left was the pain.

She crumpled, knees hitting the floor, and her mother’s hologram knelt before her, eyes sad.

“What’s wrong, Allura? What happened?”

Allura pressed her knuckles to her eyes, fighting against a rising panic. Where before she’d been unable to feel anything, now she felt too much—hurt and confusion and grief and fear, all tossed together in a slurry of tears and trembling hands. And why? Because her father had lied about one meaningless conversation with Zarkon? Because he’d died before he could explain? Or because she could no longer be sure that he would have explained—or that she would have liked his answer had he given it?

“Why did this war start?” Allura asked, staring at the shifting blue aurora on the ground beneath her mother’s hologram.

“It was Zarkon,” said Keturah’s voice. The light changed, and Allura knew the ghosts of her other friends had joined her. They should have been confined to the computer array below the bridge—but no. She’d rescinded the order to keep hologram forms inactive in the ship’s public areas.

Allura forced herself to look up, though it drove another spear through her to see the faces of so many dead friends—not just her mother and Keturah, but Rukka and Sa as well. They were arrayed around her, faces somber. Alfor still stood to the side, as expressionless as a Galra sentry.

“But _why?_ ” Allura demanded. “Zarkon was one of us. Why attack? What caused him to turn against us?”

“Nothing caused it,” Sa said, his voice tight. “He just decided the life of a paladin wasn’t big enough for him.”

“He wanted power,” Rukka said.

“He wanted control.” Sa looked sad.

Lealle and Keturah remained silent, their eyes slightly unfocused. Their memory profiles contained little of the war, as neither of them had had a chance to store their final memories before they died.

Allura focused on Rukka instead. “It’s more than that, though. Father argued with Zarkon— _before_ Zarkon turned against us. There’s something he didn’t tell us. There’s more to this than we know. He--” Allura faltered, something unspoken rising to choke her.

Keturah frowned. “You think this war was Alfor’s fault?”

“No,” Allura said, forcefully. Then, she hesitated. “Perhaps. I don’t know.” She sighed, slumping. “I just want answers.”

The dead paladins remained silent, though that hardly surprised Allura. She wouldn’t find her answers here. The only ones who might know what had happened between Zarkon and Alfor ten thousand years ago were the Black Lion—who was so deeply scarred by Zarkon’s betrayal Allura was loathe to ask her to recall those days—and Zarkon himself.

The weight of all those questions pressed down on her, squeezing her chest until it felt as though she couldn’t drag in any air at all.

It wasn’t fair. They’d fought for so long, given up so much. The last generation of paladins had died trying to give the universe a chance against Zarkon’s tyranny, and this new generation was willing to do the same. They were outmatched, outnumbered, scrambling for time and allies and knowledge, but they refused to give up.

And her father had chosen to erase his memory profile, stealing information that might have given Allura the edge she needed to begin to make some headway in this impossible fight.

_Why?_

Allura looked up at her father’s hologram, a deep, visceral hatred burning in her chest. She tried to remind herself of the things she’d loved about her father, but she couldn’t make herself remember anything but the secrets he’d taken to his grave.

She didn’t want to hate him.

Eventually, Allura forced herself to stand, ignoring Lealle’s hand reaching out for her, ignoring Keturah’s sharp-eyed gaze. “Computer, disable hologram interface.”

All five holograms suddenly flickered, dissolving in a swirl of starlight as Allura strode past them to the control panel. She called up a screen and searched through the archives, her heart pounding agony in her chest as she pulled up Meri’s goodbye.

She didn’t know why she suddenly needed to see this; she’d watched it once after she first woke up, then tried her hardest not to think of it. Of _her._

But she needed to see Meri’s face. Needed to hear her voice. She no longer knew who her father had been; the paladins’ memory profiles only allowed for an imperfect echo of their lives. But Meri’s recording was _her,_  really and truly, and right now Allura needed something she could trust not to be a hollow imitation of the people she’d once loved.

“Hey, Allura,” Meri said as the message began to play. She stood alone at this same control panel, the empty bridge visible behind her. Her short red hair was limp and greasy, her eyes shining with tears, but she managed a smile. “If you’re watching this, I guess that means I’m dead.”

That was as far as Meri made it before she broke down, her face contorting in sorrow, her tears spilling over. Allura’s eyes misted, too, but she swallowed her tears, searching the screen for every last detail, everything she’d missed the first time around. She took in the nick in the shoulder of Meri’s paladin armor, which had been repaired by the automatic systems long before Lance arrived to claim it. She took in the bruise on Meri’s cheekbone and wondered where it had come from.

“I’m sorry,” Meri whispered. “Quiznak, Allura, I’m so sorry. I don’t want to leave you, but—I have to. I didn’t want to admit it, but your dad’s right. We can’t stop Zarkon. We’re too broken.” With a deep breath, Meri calmed herself, combing her fingers through her hair. The motion left furrows and let Allura see the tremble in her hands. “But I’m sure Coran can fill you in on all the justifications. That’s not why I’m recording this.

“I wanted to say goodbye, Allura. I wish we would’ve gotten the chance for a real goodbye, but the universe isn’t going to give us that.”

The universe? Allura scoffed. No. No, it was _Alfor_ who’d ensured Allura couldn’t say goodbye to the remnants of her family. He’d put her in stasis. _He’d_ stolen the choice right out of her hands.

Allura closed her eyes, willing her anger away as Meri continued. Allura let Meri’s voice wash over her, soft as silk and warm as a kiss. Altea, but she missed Meri.

“So… goodbye, Allura. Stay strong. If anyone can train up a new batch of paladins and kick Zarkon’s ass, it’s you. I know you’re going to be hurting, and I know you’re probably going to wonder whether you’re really up to the challenge, but… If it helps, just remember that I’ve always believed in you.”

There was silence for several seconds, and Allura covered her face. She knew Meri was sobbing now, her whole body shaking with the force of her grief, and Allura couldn’t force herself to watch.

“Alfor says--" Meri faltered, took a shuddering breath, and tried again. "Alfor says there’s a chance the lions will choose their new paladins quickly. He says there’s a chance this isn’t forever. Fifty years from now, a hundred, maybe you’ll turn up on this planet I’m headed off to.” Meri paused, and Allura saw her smile in her mind’s eye, bright and hopeful despite the despair behind her golden eyes. “A hundred years isn’t such a long time. All it’d mean is that I’d finally be older than you. Then I’d get to boss _you_ around.”

Allura let out a soft sound, somewhere between a sob and a laugh.

“I’ll wait for you, Allura,” Meri said, her voice soft. “However long it takes, I'll wait for you.”

The recording ended, and Allura couldn’t make herself move to dismiss it. Meri’s tear-stained face stared back at her, a small smile playing at her lips. Allura leaned her elbows on the control panel, her hands clapped over her mouth, tears streaming from her eyes.

The bridge door hissed open. Allura was aware of this, but moving at all, even to conceal what had brought her here, was beyond her. Footsteps approached, and Allura felt herself tense.

“You know, I kinda figured I’d find you up here,” Lance said, leaning against the control panel beside her. He kept his face turned away, his eyes darting once to Meri’s face before fixing on the stars visible outside. “Especially once Pidge said you hadn’t been down to see Black.”

Allura sniffled once, wiping halfheartedly at her tears. “Did you need something?”

Lance paused, then reached into his jacket pocket and plunked two small glass bottles on the console between them. “Yeah. I need somebody who understands the value in a good pampering.”

Allura stared at the bottles—nail polish. Allura’s nail polish, if she wasn’t mistaken. Meri had bought those pink sparkles for her as a birthday gift one year. Heart clenching, Allura looked up at Lance.

He seemed uncertain, but he leaned his shoulder against hers with a cautious smile. “No pressure, of course, but I actually managed to convince Pidge _and_ Keith to get in on some team manicures. They wouldn’t promise to go in for facials, too, but Hunk and I are on board, at the very least. I thought… maybe you might appreciate a little bit of a pick-me-up.”

“I don’t know, Lance.”

Lance shrugged. “Like I said, no pressure, but you know… Tía Lena always said happiness was a three step program: Look good, do good, surround yourself with good.”

Allura frowned, glancing at him, and the twitch of his lips said he’d been hoping for a chance to elaborate.

“Pamper yourself, dress up, all that jazz,” he explained, ticking it off on one finger. “Make yourself feel cute, or pretty, or powerful. Give yourself a confidence boost.” He raised another finger. “Be a good person, and do nice stuff for the people in your life.” He ticked off a third finger, smiling at her again. “And surround yourself with people who care about you.” He dropped his hands, shrugging. “I mean, you’re already gorgeous _and_ badass _and_ kinda leading the charge on intergalactic do-goodery, so you’ve got the first two steps under your belt, but hey. A little company’s nice every now and again. When you’re ready.”

He straightened up, grabbing the nail polish from the console and moving as though to put them back in his pocket, but Allura grabbed his hand to stop him.

He watched her, concealing his hope behind a bland smile.

Allura breathed in, then wiped her tears. “I think this Tía Lena is a very wise woman,” she said.

Lance grinned, pulled her into a hug, then led her out the door and down toward the rec room. He was right, after all. Allura needed her family today.


	24. Before the Storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... In the wake of the battle against the black paladins, Team Voltron finally got a chance to rest. Allura woke up from stasis and, after an emotional confrontation with her father's AI, went to rest and relax with the rest of her team. Matt, meanwhile has been working nonstop on a new prosthetic for Shiro, hoping to have it finished before Shiro wakes up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: minor character death. (Stop reading at "They reached the hangar" and skip down to "Lasers continued to fill the air" if you need to.)

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  ** Entry –  
>  Dated –
> 
> **Pidge’s notes:** I’ve been neglecting these logs. I know I have. Aside from looking through them for references to the override, when was the last time I worked on the translation?
> 
> I couldn’t tell you.
> 
> I guess I just needed a few days to think about the fact that we have Shiro and Allura back—and _not_ about all the other people Haggar still has.

* * *

Waking from cryosleep felt uncomfortably like emerging from the fog of Haggar’s control. Shiro fell back into his body too quickly, unsure if the cold he felt was the pod or the override, his eyes squeezed shut. If he’d killed someone else, he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to face it.

He swayed, reaching out with his right arm to catch himself on—the pod door?--the Black Lion’s console?--the cell wall? Wherever he was, he couldn’t say, but his hand found nothing but empty air. Then he was falling, hands snapping up to catch him.

Someone else was there first, arms wrapping around around his chest. “I’ve got you, Shiro,” Allura said. “Just relax.”

Questions swirled in Shiro’s head—where was he? What had happened? Were the others here? But he was still unsteady, and he reached up to take hold of Allura’s arms. His left hand found her shoulder, but his right—his right--

Shiro opened his eyes and stared for a long moment at nothing. His arm was gone. The prosthetic along with several inches more than what he’d lost the first time around. There was no horror to accompany this realization. No sorrow or pain or alarm. He just… stared.

The cryopod behind him hissed as it retracted into the ground, which confirmed that, yes, he was back on the castle-ship. Pressure built up behind his eyes, but he blinked furiously, straining to pull himself upright. The others—Pidge and Hunk and Lance. Shay. Keith, even. They couldn’t see Shiro falling apart. He had to hold it together. He had to be strong for them. He had to--

Shiro looked up, bracing himself for whatever came, whether fear or sympathy or tears, only to find the room empty except for him and Allura.

“Where…?” Shiro grimaced, wetting dry, cracked lips. “Where is everyone?”

“Just up on the bridge,” Allura said. “Anamuri wanted to check in, I think.” Pausing, Allura helped Shiro straighten up but didn’t move away from him. She kept her head bowed, her fingers working at something on Shiro’s side. A sudden weight left him, and he looked down just as Allura tossed a Galra breastplate toward the far wall. She kept working as she talked, slowly stripping away the rest of the armor. “They all think you’ll be waking up in about three hours, or I’m sure they’d all be flinging themselves at you right now.”

Shiro frowned, trying to wrestle his thoughts into line. Dark fog and laserfire and the sight of Arus burning below him tumbled through his mind, making it difficult to focus on anything else. “Three hours? Did I wake up early or something?”

“No,” said Allura, drawing out the word. “I changed the readout on your pod.”

“ _Why?_ ”

Allura had been crouched to remove the armor from his legs, but she straightened up and stared at him. She knew. (Of course she knew. She was a piece of him as much as his lion. She saw through him the same way Akira always had, knowing the things he refused to say, understanding the things he couldn’t put into words.)

She knew what Haggar had done to him, knew how profoundly it had shaken him. And she knew, without him having to say a word, that he _could not_ let the other paladins see how broken he was.

Shiro’s next breath caught in his throat. The weight of it all gathered in his chest, too much and too immediate to be held off. And not just this incident— _all_ of it. His capture on Kerberos. Losing Sam. The Arena. Hurting Matt. Fighting, killing, hanging onto his life with everything he had in him. The Altean boy. Losing his arm. Losing control. Fighting in the Galra army. Breaking free, finally, and treading water for a few months as the nightmares clawed at his throat and at his mind. He’d tried so hard, _so hard_ , to put his past behind him. To heal. He’d wanted to be what his team needed him to be.

But then Haggar had come and taken him again, and all the falsework he’d built to shore his crumbling composure had been washed away and he was adrift again amidst the wreckage of his life from before the war. He was home again, but he didn’t know how he was supposed to rebuild himself this time.

Once the tears came, there was no stopping them. Allura embraced him, and Shiro clung to her, gasping for air as a year and a half worth of aches spilled out of him.

“It’s okay, Shiro,” Allura whispered, her own voice tremulous, warm tears soaking through his undersuit where Allura had her face turned into his shoulder. “It’s okay. It’s just us.”

Shiro wanted to thank her, but breathing was hard enough on its own without trying to be coherent. The cracks running through him, cracks he’d tried to plaster over, cracks that had been growing day by day as he pushed his own problems down and focused instead on helping the others, raced out from his core through his entire being. Pieces of him crumbled. He’d fashioned himself into a leader, calm and level-headed. He’d projected strength, pretended he knew what he was doing, because that was what the others had needed from him.

He couldn’t do that now. He _couldn’t._

Shiro didn’t know how long they stood there, crying tears long overdue. For the first time since Kerberos, Shiro let the enormity of what had been done to him wash over him, and he clung to Allura as the rising tides threatened to drown him.

_I’m not what they think I am. I’m not that strong._

For just this moment, then, he let himself be weak.

The tears tapered off eventually, leaving Shiro feeling wrung-out. He was exhausted, his legs quivering like he’d just run a marathon, his breath still coming in shuddering gasps.

“How long was I out?” he asked, his voice scratchy.

Allura’s was hardly better, and he could hear an echo of his own weariness in her. She’d suffered as much as him, if in different ways. “Four days,” she said. “We considered pulling you out yesterday, but your Quintessence was still a little thin.”

“That desperate to give me another full night’s sleep?” he asked wryly, and Allura rewarded him with a small chuckle.

“Honestly I was just trying to put it off until I could pull you out without a swarm of hrimflings here to smother you.”

A smile tugged at Shiro’s lips, and he leaned back, taking in the tear tracks on Allura’s face. She looked tired, but so much better than the anguished, bleak Allura he’d seen inside Haggar’s prison. “Well, I appreciate it.”

She did a fair job of masking her smugness, but Shiro had to admit she’d been right on this. Even tired and worn thin as he was, he could admit that he’d needed this. The pressure had been building for too long; he wouldn’t have been able to hold out much longer before he broke down. Better to do it here, with only Allura to witness.

“Matt’s going to be mad I got to see you first,” Allura said, smiling as Shiro’s entire body locked up.

Matt.

Matt was--

“He’s alive?”

Allura laughed, wiping away her tears. “He’s alive. He’s fine, Shiro. He’s--” She paused, her eyes closing in pain. "He _is_ fine, but... Shiro, there's something I need to tell you, and you must promise me you will hear me through to the end before you assume the worst."

Shiro's pulse quickened, but he nodded. Matt was alive. As long as he held onto that fact, he could face the rest. "All right."

"Haggar... augmented your arm so that it could project Quintessence. She used that against Matt, and it caused his crystals to grow out of control. He's _fine_ , Shiro. Shay prevented any significant internal damage, and the others modified a pod to draw off the excess Quintessence so the crystals could shrink. But it did leave... scars. Crystalline scars on his skin and in the iris of his eye. Shay has looked him over, and she's confident they won't cause any negative side effects, but they are permanent."

Shiro closed his eyes, breathing out. "Okay," he said, trying to wrap his head around it. Crystalline scars. What did that even _mean_? "Okay. He's okay?"

"He is," Allura said.

“And Keith?”

"Him too,” Allura said. “They’re all okay.”

The tears he'd only just beat back returned, spilling out as a swirl of emotions rose behind his sternum. He chose to focus on the fact that his friends were okay--that they were alive--over the rest. That knowledge reverberated in his bones, bolstering him, and he turned toward the door. “You said they’re on the bridge?”

He was moving before she answered, scrubbing at the tears that had left crusty trails on his face. Now that that the flood of emotions had come and gone, he found all he really wanted was to see his friends. To see that they were okay. To clear the air and make whatever amends needed to be made, and then to ground himself firmly in the here and now.

Allura kept pace with him, filling him in on what had happened while he was out—from the others’ attempt to get Shiro back to the battle on Arus to the four days since (which, from the sound of it, had been the first real break any of them had gotten.)

“We’re still in hiding,” Allura explained. “And I’m not planning on going anywhere for at least another two or three days. We’ve been pushing ourselves hard for a long time. Too hard.”

Shiro had to agree with her. The younger paladins deserved a break after all they’d been through. And… yeah, Shiro had to admit he wouldn’t mind stepping back for a bit. If he never saw another druid again, it would be too soon.

He paused just outside the bridge, heart in his throat, a haze of shapeless fears hovering around the edges of his mind. After everything Shiro had done while under Haggar’s control, could they all really be okay with it? With _him_?

Shiro hit the door controls before the thought had a chance to take hold. Allura had said they were all eager to see him. He would trust her in this.

The paladins were all arranged around the central hologram display when Shiro arrived, most of them turned toward the forward viewscreen, where Anamuri was visible in a comms window. Everyone was dressed comfortably, and some of them seemed to have found new clothes. Or maybe Lance had been sewing again. Pidge was sitting on the console beside their brother, kicking their legs, and Hunk and Shay were giggling together at the back of the group.

Keith’s ear swiveled toward the door as it opened, his eyes following a moment later. When he spotted Shiro, he froze, lips parting. Shiro offered an apologetic smile, and that was all it took to get Keith moving, shoving past Lance and Coran.

“ _Shiro!_ ”

“Hey, Ke—oof.” Shiro stumbled back into Allura as Keith hit him, arms wrapping around Shiro’s torso, face pressed against his chest. Keith was shaking, and Shiro automatically moved to rub his back. He forgot he no longer had a right hand, though, and before he could compensate, Keith was pulling back, watery eyes searching Shiro’s face.

“You’re okay,” Keith whispered.

Tears sprang to Shiro’s eyes. “Dammit,” he muttered, reaching out to ruffle Keith’s hair. “I thought I was done with the waterworks for today.”

Yeah, right. Even as Keith ducked away from Shiro’s hand, a grin splitting his face, Shiro registered the sounds of shouts coming from behind Keith, and the thunder of approaching footsteps that gave him an instant’s warning before first Pidge, then Hunk and Lance, barreled into him. Shay joined Allura at his back, her broad hands holding him upright—and a good thing, too, as Coran quite literally leaped into the huddle.

Shiro’s eyes were more than a little misty by then, but even partially blind, he was pretty sure it was Ryner who laid a hand on his right arm, just above the fresh, smooth scar where it ended. Shiro’s heart clenched at the reminder, but Ryner showed no signs of disgust.

“What the heck, Allura?” Lance demanded, disrupting the entire huddle as he wriggled to where he could glare at Allura. “I thought you said it was going to be a few more hours!”

“Whoops,” Allura said, her voice bright. “I must have misspoke.”

Shiro laughed into someone’s shoulder. Hunk’s, he thought, unless Pidge had grown several feet since Shiro had last seen them. At the sound, Lance seemed to forget his anger, squishing Shiro’s face between his hands and staring him in the eye.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Shiro arched an eyebrow, blinking a few times to clear his vision. “Okay, well, I don’t know why you're asking, and both your hands are on my face, so… I’m not really sure what you want from me here.”

Lance grinned, then flung his arms around Shiro’s neck, bending him forward until he stumbled into Coran.

Pidge wrinkled their nose and elbowed Lance aside. “You're not supposed to _give_ him a concussion, Lance,” they said, and Lance stuck his tongue out at them.

“Don’t mind them,” Hunk said, taking advantage of the distraction to envelop Shiro more fully in his hug. “They’re just happy to see you.”

“The feeling’s mutual,” Shiro said, even as he began the slow process of extricating himself from the hug. He was feeling a little claustrophobic with so many people around him, all of them brushing up against his amputated arm. “Allura says...”

Shiro trailed off as he caught sight of Matt, who had stopped a few feet back from the rest of them, his hands clutching at the collar of his sweatshirt. Shiro’s heart stopped at the sight of him, iridescent scars spotting the side of his face, one eye a startling shade of ice blue. The changes were so drastic that for a moment Shiro didn’t realize Matt was crying—and Shiro didn’t think these were the same happy tears as were in the others’ eyes.

“Matt...” Shiro began. “I’m--”

“I’m so sorry,” Matt said, stealing the words from Shiro’s mouth. He covered his face, his hands shaking. “I’m so, _so_ sorry, Shiro.”

“You—what?” Shiro glanced around, hoping someone would step in with an explanation, but the others had all backed off, their expressions guarded. Shiro turned back to Matt. “What do _you_ have to apologize for?”

Matt opened his mouth, faltered, then forced his hands down. His mismatched eyes darted to Shiro’s arm. “I’m the one who—Your arm—”

 _Oh, right._ Allura had mentioned that it was Matt who’d cut off the arm; Shiro remembered that now. It hadn't seemed like that big a deal at the time. Shiro stepped toward Matt, offering a smile. “You don’t have to apologize for that,” he said. “If anything, I should be thanking you.”

“ _Thanking_ me?” Matt looked up, his face pained, and Shiro finally recognized that guilt. He imagined he’d looked much the same the first time he saw the scar on Matt’s leg. Uncertainty played across his face for a long moment as Shiro held out a hand toward him, holding his breath.

It was like Matt had flipped a switch in his head. His jaw firmed; his eyes, sharper now and mostly free of guilt, met Shiro’s. Then he took Shiro’s hand and stepped forward into a kiss. There was desperation in that kiss, and the lingering traces of pain, but Shiro melted into it, feeling Matt do the same. He wanted to pull Matt closer, but their hands were still linked together between them.

Matt seemed to sense Shiro’s thoughts, or had the same need for closeness, because his free hand slid across the bare skin of Shiro’s neck, pulling him deeper.

Breaking away, Matt buried his face in the curve of Shiro’s neck, his hands splaying across Shiro’s back. Shiro held him, breathing him in, and released the remnants of his fear on the exhale.

They had to break apart eventually, though Shiro did so only reluctantly. When he did, he noticed a new face peeking out from behind Coran’s back. An _Altean_ face.

Shiro blinked, then almost collapsed when he realized he _recognized_ that face. It was the young man they’d thrown into the Arena, the one Shiro had refused to fight. The one he’d saved from the mutated Balmeran, losing his arm in the process, only to find that Zarkon had had the boy executed the same day.

“How?” he breathed.

Beaming, Coran rested his hand atop the boy’s head, coaxing him out into the open. “This is Wyn. Wyn, meet Shiro.”

Wyn smiled shyly, while Shiro went on staring. It wasn’t… It couldn’t be…

Keith sidled up to him, arms crossed, trying to hide his smile. “So it turns out they were lying when they said they’d executed him. Lance rescued him from Haggar’s ship the day we lost you.”

Shiro wasn’t going to cry again. He _wasn’t_. But— _god—_ when Wyn finally stepped away from Coran and looked up at Shiro, it was hard to hold back. Wyn. Shiro closed his eyes, fixing the name in his head. _Wyn._ Whatever else had come of his time in Zarkon’s hands, here was one sliver of good. Wyn was alive. Shiro had kept Wyn alive. He could be proud of that.

* * *

_**We are home.** _

Black’s greeting washed over him as soon as he set food inside her hangar, purr of affection, relief, and gratitude that left Shiro feeling buoyant. The Black Lion’s voice was so loud to Shiro’s ears that he thought surely the others must have heard it, too, but they showed no sign of noticing anything different. Not Matt, who hadn’t let go of Shiro’s arm since dragging him off the bridge, not Pidge and Hunk who had raced ahead, practically vibrating in anticipation of whatever it was Matt wanted to show him.

Only Allura seemed to have heard anything, and she just smiled innocently at Shiro when his questioning gaze turned her way.

“I think someone missed you,” she whispered. Matt glanced around Shiro at Allura, then up at Black. He smiled.

“Yeah, she really does adore you.” Matt’s eyes sparkled as Shiro frowned at him. “What? Black and I have been spending a lot of time together these last few days.”

Shiro’s eyebrows crept toward his hairline. “Oh, really? Are you going to take over as black paladin now?”

Matt looked horrified. “God, no.”

“Seriously, though,” said Lance, grinning, as he came up behind Matt. “Would that make Shiro a red?” He shuddered dramatically, and Matt deliberately stopped walking so that Lance ran into him from behind. “Ow. Hey!”

Matt kept his face forward, smirking, and glanced sidelong at Shiro. “Besides. If anyone’s gonna be a substitute black paladin, it’s Lance.”

Lance went suddenly red, which only served to further pique Shiro’s interest. Allura had mentioned something about Lance coming up with the plan that had brought the two of them back, but she hadn’t gone into much detail. It seemed Shiro had missed out on quite a lot while he was out of commission.

“Actually, Matt's got a point,” Keith put in—and Lance looked like he wanted to melt into the floor. "Lance really stepped up while you were gone."

Shiro would definitely have to hear this story. But not yet. Pidge and Hunk had emerged from the shadow between the Black Lion’s front paws, holding something behind their backs. They stood shoulder to shoulder, grinning broadly, and came to a stop a few feet from Shiro. Matt pulled away from Shiro, backing toward Pidge and Hunk. He looked nervous. Why did he look nervous?

“Okay,” Matt said, holding up his hands. “Now, keep in mind this is still a work in progress. We can change things, or add things, or scrap the whole thing if you like.”

Pidge gave a dramatic eye-roll behind Matt’s back, then (very un-subtly) elbowed him in the side. He doubled over, laughing a laugh Shiro recognized as self-conscious. His cheeks had gone pink and splotchy the way they did when he wanted people to stop looking at him.

Shiro frowned at him. “What is this?”

Matt held up a finger, paused with his mouth hanging open, then waved Hunk and Pidge forward, burying his face in his hands. The pair of them smiled, stepping apart and lifting up--

An arm.

Shiro’s breath caught in his throat. It was a new prosthetic arm, different in design to the one he’d lost. The socket came higher, for one—up nearly to his shoulder. Sleek black plates covered the forearm and bicep, the hand and elbow showing the silvered inner workings. Gold accents marked the knuckles, and the Voltron wings were marked on the shoulder in red. The soft blue glow of Quintessence seeped through the joints.

“Everyone helped,” Matt said, fiddling with his sleeves. “Pidge did the programming, Ryner and Shay did the interface, Coran helped with the fit—the pod did a scan, so it should be nice and snug. Hunk helped out with the actual construction, Lance painted, Keith and Allura designed most of it, and—”

“And somehow Matt still managed to do, like, eighty-five percent of the work,” Hunk said.

Matt flushed. “Not true.” He ducked his head as everyone looked at him with varying degrees of incredulity and exasperation. “Like. _Half._ And most of _that_ was Black.”

“Black?” Shiro asked, glancing up at the lion. She purred, but offered no explanation.

Matt nodded, biting his lip. “Well… You know how much trouble we were having figuring out that heap of shit Haggar made? I don’t think we would have been able to give you something that responded half as well or had the same dexterity. Not working with scrap metal and dismembered sentries. So...” He shrugged, reaching up to pat the side of the Black Lion’s chin. “She donated the core.”

Shiro stared again at the prosthetic, speechless, overwhelmed by Black’s contented purr in his chest. “She…?” He reached out cautiously and rested a hand on the black casing. A profound sense of peace and protectiveness washed over him—the same things he felt from Black’s presence in his mind, but magnified a hundredfold.

He blinked furiously, clearing his throat twice before he managed to speak. “This is amazing,” he whispered. “ _Thank you._ ”

Matt seemed flustered by Shiro’s gratitude and launched into an explanation of the arm—just an arm, he assured Shiro. It wasn’t a weapon this time, unless Shiro wanted them to try to give it offensive capabilities. “We figured you’d had enough of being someone else’s weapon for one lifetime,” Matt explained, oblivious to the emotional avalanche that kept threatening to bring Shiro to his knees. Keith noticed, though, and steadied Shiro with a hand on his shoulder.

“It really is just an arm,” Keith whispered as Matt got into the details of the psychic interface—similar enough to Shiro’s connection to Black that when Shiro automatically moved to cover Keith’s hand with his own, the prosthetic in Hunk’s arms twitched. Keith smiled at it, and then at Shiro, ignoring the chorus of excited shouting. “No strings. No secret programs. We’re not like Haggar, Shiro. We just want you to be happy.”

Shiro returned the smile earnestly, if a little tearfully. "I know," he said. "Thank you."

Shiro felt a brief flash of panic a few minutes later when Matt asked if he wanted to test the arm out. For just an instant, Shiro was back under the druids’ knife, strapped to a table as his flesh was cut away and a foreign _thing_ grafted onto the stump.

Then Matt held up the harness—one elastic loop connected to the prosthetic and another, made of something closer to nylon, to go around his left arm. The loops were connected at a bright green O-ring that settled itself over his spine near his collar. Matt had to help him into it this time, guiding Shiro’s residual limb into the socket and adjusting the straps to a comfortable fit, but Shiro would be able to put it on easily enough with a bit of practice.

He stood there, flexing the fingers of a hand that already felt more a part of him than Haggar’s abomination despite—or perhaps _because of—_ the fact that this one wasn't surgically grafted onto his body.

Matt had his arms wrapped around Shiro from behind, Keith seemed unwilling to stray more than a foot from Shiro’s side, Lance kept dishing out compliments about how dashing he looked with the new arm while Shay giggled into her hand. Pidge and Hunk were still going on about the arm’s inner workings—how Black had roped the other lions into a game of psychic telephone to pass along some advice, how they were working on a way for the arm to interface with Shiro’s armor to help take some of the strain of battle or other heavy activity. And Allura stood to the side with Coran, Ryner, and Wyn, all of them smiling contentedly as they watched the scene.

Matt propped his chin on Shiro’s shoulder and looked at him hopefully. “Good?” he asked.

“The best.”

* * *

A few hours later, after everyone got some food in them, after another three or four rounds of hugs all around, the paladins settled down to a game of cards in the rec room. Wyn sat himself between Shiro and Lance to watch, and to offer Shiro advice. This was Shiro's first time playing Castle's Flight, one of Allura's favorite games from her childhood, and Wyn had taken the game up with an enthusiasm unmatched by any of the other players. Matt wasn't particularly fond of it, but he sat on the couch behind Shiro and helped Wyn explain the rules.

Coran sat at the end of the couch watching with Ryner and Shay, a smile tugging at his lips.

"You'd hardly believe he was at Haggar's mercy just a few days ago," Ryner said softly as Shiro tilted his cards down to let Wyn see. Wyn kept fidgeting with an overabundance of restless energy, and Shiro's face softened every time he glanced at the boy.

Coran raised an eyebrow in Ryner's direction. "Do you mean Wyn? Or Shiro?"

"Both. Either." Ryner tapped her thumb on the rind of her latest botany experiment. She claimed the taste wasn't quite right yet, though she was having trouble figuring out where she'd gone wrong. "To be honest, I was scared both of them would be permanently changed by their experiences."

"As was I," Coran admitted. Wyn had remained quiet and withdrawn for two days after the battle, and not even Maka could tease him out of his shell. By the end of the second day, Coran had begun to fear his technopathy had had more of an impact than anyone had realized. But he'd come out of it. Slowly, to be sure, but Wyn was a remarkably resilient boy.

"They are changed," Shay said, resting her chin on her knees. Her eyes crinkled in a smile as, with a shout of triumph, Allura seized victory in the first hand. "Perhaps not irrevocably, but they _are_ changed."

Coran hummed thoughtfully. Shay was right, of course. Wyn and Shiro and Allura all laughed and smiled and chatted as well as any of the other paladins, but Coran could see the fragility in their moods. They weren't being disingenuous, but their happiness was still a brittle frost overlaying deeper hurt. That hurt had always been there, of course. Coran had seen it in Allura, and now he could recognize the signs in Shiro and Wyn--signs that had always been there; signs Coran had overlooked in his eagerness to believe that the youths in his care weren't quite as bruised as he feared they were.

No, none of them had had the time they needed to heal. Not yet. But they were heading that way. Coran could see it in the way Allura's smile relaxed into something more genuine when Wyn draped himself across her feet. He could see it in the way Shiro leaned back against Matt's legs, listening attentively as Pidge told him about a game Ryner had taught them all. He could see it in Wyn's eyes when he turned toward Coran with a quizzical look, asking if Coran wanted in on the next hand. Coran only shook his head.

Yes, they were broken, but they were piecing themselves back together. All of them, together. That was as much as anyone could hope for.

* * *

Shiro set his prosthetic on the nightstand, smiling as Black’s presence faded from his mind. It had been surprisingly easy to get used to having her in his mind wherever he went, even if he thought she was a bit over-enthusiastic with the silent encouragement.

“What’s that look for?” Matt asked, amused, as he sat on the edge of the bed and carefully removed his knee brace. It was all the same old symptoms, he explained—weakness, tremors, the occasional flare-up of pain or numbness—just more pronounced since his latest tussle with the crystals trying to take over his body. The brace he’d built into his armor just wasn’t enough anymore.

The brace clicked against Shiro’s prosthetic as Matt set it aside for the night, and Shiro took Matt’s leg into his lap, massaging it as best as he could with only one hand. Matt sighed, flopping back onto the pillows.

“I think I get it now,” Matt said, watching him through drooping lashes. The shocking blue of his left eye still gave Shiro pause, but it had become less jarring as the day wore on.

“Get what?” Shiro asked, working out a knot in Matt’s calf.

Matt’s eyes fluttered closed, his leg tensing for a moment before relaxing. “Why you did it.” Shiro’s hand slowed, his thumb running over the twisted scar on Matt’s shin. “Why it still eats at you. It’s easy for me to see that you were making the best choice you could, that you just wanted to save me. I try to remind myself of that whenever I start feeling sick about your arm.”

Shiro looked at him, his mouth running dry. “I _don’t_ blame you for that.”

“I know.” Matt smiled holding out his hand toward Shiro. “And I don’t blame you. But I understand now how hard it is to stop blaming yourself.”

Shiro took Matt’s hand, letting himself be coaxed down beside him. He’d never learned to do things one-handed; Haggar had attached her prosthetic as soon as Shiro lost the use of his right arm. It was a little awkward now, and Shiro felt unbalanced as he settled in beside Matt, pulling the blankets up over them both.

They could have stayed in the rec room for the unofficial sleepover that had, apparently, been going on since the team pulled back from Arus, but Shiro wasn’t feeling up to it. The fissures in his soul were smaller than they’d been in the darkest moments, but they were still there. Shiro could feel them running through him. He was a cracked vessel, and he could no longer hold the past inside him.

“I killed thirty-seven prisoners in the Arena.”

Matt shifted beside him—not pulling away, just rolling onto his side, one hand coming up to rest on Shiro’s chest. Shiro could feel that steady gaze on the side of his head, but he didn’t meet it. He couldn’t. He stared at the ceiling above him and let the words pour out through the cracks.

“I never killed the new arrivals. They all reminded me of you—and of me, I guess.” Shiro shook his head, his eyes falling shut. He could still see them. The faces. Nine months of matches, and he could still see each and every opponent as clear as the day they faced off across those colorless sands. “I had to fight them, but they didn’t make me kill them. So I didn’t. But the challengers, the ones who rose through the ranks and tried to take my place as Champion… I had to kill them. The challenges didn’t end until someone was dead.”

Matt said nothing as Shiro talked, giving shape to his months in the Arena for the first time. Matt didn’t try to chase away Shiro’s pain or soothe him with empty reassurances. He just listened, his head on Shiro’s shoulder, his hand over Shiro’s pounding heart.

Then, when the words ran out, Matt curled around him, their legs intertwined. “I’m so sorry, Takashi. I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m sorry I can’t fix the shit they threw at you. But I won’t be sorry that you survived.”

“Even though I murdered all those people?”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve got a rock solid self-defense case here,” Matt said, his voice straining for levity. Then he sighed, pushed himself up, and leaned over Shiro, one hand on either side of his body. “I know you well enough to know you can’t let go of this that easily, but let me ask you this: What defines you? The things you had to do when you were a prisoner and fighting for your life? Or the things we’re doing _now?_ The things you _choose_ to do?”

Shiro touched the side of Matt’s face, staring into the storm swirling deep within his left eye. That eye glowed faintly in the darkness, as did the crystalline scars that framed it.

“I love you, Shiro,” Matt said, his voice fervent and thick with tears. “Every piece of you. Nothing you tell me is ever going to change that.” His smile turned crooked, and he pressed his cheek into Shiro’s palm. “I hope you know I mean to spend the rest of my life with you, Takashi Shirogane.”

Shiro’s heart beat hard against his throat, his palm burning where it touched Matt’s skin. His mind seemed to have gone quiet, his whole being focused on the utter adoration in Matt’s eyes. “Are you proposing?”

“Not yet,” Matt said, leaning down to kiss him. “We’re both in a bad place now, and I don’t want us to make this decision because we’re scared, or desperate, or because _Pirates_ tried to convince us it was romantic to get married in the middle of a fight.” He flashed a lopsided smile, obviously trying to make light of the situation, but Shiro could feel the weight behind his words. That _not yet_ hung in the air as Matt lay back down beside him, brushing the hair back from Shiro’s face. “Besides, what’s the rush? I don’t intend to let either of us die, Takashi.”

“Me either,” Shiro said, surprised to find he meant it.

Matt smiled, closing his eyes. “Well, then. The day we win this war is the day I’m going to ask you to marry me. You can give me your answer then.”

He didn’t speak again after that, but Shiro continued to watch him, amazed that he could have found someone so wonderful. His chest rose and fell, his heart still pounding with affection so strong he thought it might pull him apart at the seams. He rolled over, pressing a kiss to Matt’s forehead. Matt didn’t react, and Shiro wondered whether he’d fallen asleep already.

“I don’t say it enough,” Shiro whispered, “but I love you, Matt. So much.”

Matt hummed contentedly, his fingers trailing down Shiro’s arm, and Shiro finally surrendered himself to the darkness.

* * *

Images of Matt and Keith lying dead at his feet haunted Shiro’s dreams, and he woke unable to breathe. The desperate need to move, to act, to undo what he’d done clawed at him and he sat upright, clutching at his chest. Matt was dead. Keith was _dead._ Shiro had killed them.

“No,” Shiro whispered, trying to force himself to breathe. “They’re alive.”

He twisted, watching Matt, who for once hadn’t been roused by Shiro’s sudden awakening. He slept on, one arm folded across his chest, the other flung out toward the wall. The scars on his face still glowed ever-so-slightly. Another time, that might have turned Shiro’s stomach, but right now he welcomed the light. It traced the shape of Matt’s face, gave the room enough light for Shiro to see the steady rise and fall of Matt’s chest.

He was alive. He was alive, and he was here, and Shiro hadn’t killed him.

Shiro repeated the words as he lay back down, trying to calm his racing heart. A glance at the clock beside the bed said he’d been asleep for less than two hours, and he knew he had to try to get more rest than that.

Matt was here. Matt was alive.

Shiro closed his eyes, but the image of Keith’s crumpled body stuck with him, drifting through his head no matter how hard he tried to banish it. He told himself Keith was every bit as alive as Matt. He reminded himself of the way Keith had so eagerly taught Shiro the rules of the Altean card game Allura had introduced them to. The way he smiled and laughed, sticking close to Shiro throughout it all.

It didn’t matter. The dark thoughts stayed with him for ten minutes before he finally gave into the siren song of paranoia. He rolled out of bed, careful not to disturb Matt, and glanced at the nightstand where his prosthetic sat. He considered trying to put it on, but he didn’t trust himself to do it in the dark without dropping the arm and waking Matt.

Besides, he would be quick. Just up to the rec room, check that Keith was there, then hurry back here for a few more hours of sleep.

The door hissed shut behind him before he could talk himself out of this, and then there was nothing to do but press on. So he started walking, following the dim blue strips along the walls. The overhead lights were switched off in the residential floors but not in the rest of the castle, and the light inside the elevator stung Shiro’s eyes as he pressed the button for the seventh floor.

He hesitated outside the rec room, glancing at the too-bright lights around him. He didn’t want to wake anyone inside with the light, but…

Steeling himself, Shiro opened the door a handspan, blocking the gap as much as he could with his body. He peered in, blinking as his eyes slowly adjusted. Someone had put up soft, color-changing lights around the room, and there was a mound of blankets in the center, sheltered by the couches. A little bit of searching turned up a pair of fuzzy ears sticking out of the mound.

 _Keith._ Shiro breathed out, already feeling foolish for getting so worked up over nothing. Of _course_ Keith was okay. Shiro had already known that. Maybe now his brain would let him sleep.

“You could join them, you know,” Matt whispered from behind him.

Shiro jumped, heart skipping a beat, and turned around, hastily shutting the door behind him. “I thought you were sleeping,” he hissed.

Matt arched an eyebrow. “I just woke up. Noticed you were gone and figured you’d come up here.” He leaned forward, hiding his face in Shiro’s shirt. “I’m serious, though. We could stay.”

“The nightmares,” Shiro began.

Matt slapped a hand over his mouth. “You know they wouldn’t think any less of us.”

It was the _us_ that stopped Shiro’s protest in its tracks. He wondered if that was why Matt had stayed away from the team sleepovers for the last few days. Wondered if he wanted to be there, but needed someone to give him the courage.

Shiro wondered if that was what _he_ needed.

With a deep breath, Shiro opened the door and led Matt inside, supporting him, as his limp was more pronounced than usual. They claimed a spot on the couch not far from Keith, and Shiro felt himself relax. After a moment, Keith rolled over, passing up a blanket.

“Sorry,” Shiro whispered. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Keith snorted. “Shut up and bond with us, Shiro.”

That made Shiro smile, and he let Matt arrange the blanket over them. Then he just breathed, letting the others’ presence lull him back to sleep.

* * *

Lance woke early, stretched, and fell back across the mound of blankets. There was a hollow beside him where Hunk had been—unsurprising, as Hunk had made a habit of getting up before everyone else to make breakfast. Shay still lay nearby, Pidge flopped across her legs, Allura a ball only identifiable by the lump she made beneath a pink silk blanket.

Ryner had already gone—probably off to help Coran with some task or another—but when Lance turned to see if Keith was up yet he was pleasantly surprised to find Matt and Shiro cuddled up together on the couch above him.

Lance barely resisted the urge to coo, and only because Matt hadn’t been getting enough sleep lately with how much work he’d been putting into Shiro’s new prosthetic. Stuffing his knuckles into his mouth and grinning, Lance tiptoed to the edge of the nest and out into the hall.

He found Hunk in the kitchen as expected, Ryner chopping fruits while Hunk made--

“Are those _pancakes_?” Lance asked, crossing his arms on the counter. The kitchen had undergone as many modifications these last few days as the rest of the castle, Hunk having improvised a new stove and oven. There were cabinets for the ingredients they had stockpiled and a rack where Pidge and Ryner deposited each day’s harvest. Today was a crop of green fruit Lance didn’t recognize and a few of the egg-shaped blue things that tasted like a strange variety of apple.

Hunk wiped his hand across his forehead, leaving behind a streak of slightly grayish flour substitute. “Kinda? I don’t actually have, like… _anything_ for real pancakes, but we’ve finally got the texture right on Ryner’s grains, and I still have the eggs from the last trade world we stopped at, so...” He shrugged, then found a spatula and flipped the pancakes in his pan. “We’ll see how well they turn out.”

Lance pulled over a chair, grabbed a spare knife, and started helping Ryner with the fruit. “Oh, don’t play that game with me, Hunk. We both know it’s going to be amazing.”

A smile teased at the corner of Hunk’s mouth, but he was already back into his cooking headspace. He said cooking was a lot like engineering—you started off making things from a set of instructions while you figured out what the different parts did and why, then you progressed to trial and error: putting things together, testing them, taking them apart, then putting them back together a different way.

Out here in space working with all new ingredients, it took even more concentration.

Lance turned to Ryner. “So how’s the castle looking?”

“Better than it was before,” Ryner said. “It’ll be another few days before we’re completely back to one hundred percent, but we finished the last of our combat-relevant repairs yesterday. All that’s left is cleaning up some of the damage in the towers where things were shaken loose.”

Lance whistled. He’d helped out with some of the repairs and quite a bit of the cleanup. He’d figured it would take way longer than a week to get the castle back on its feet. Heck, Pidge and Ryner had spent the better part of two days fixing up Green and Black alone. It was the refugees, really. Every last one of them had chipped in with the cleanup, and Zelka had three more students starting to learn how to maintain the castle’s tech.

It was home, they said. The only real home some of them had known. Of course they wanted to help keep it in the sky.

Hunk pulled the first batch of pancakes off the stove and slid the plate toward Lance and Ryner. “What do you think?”

Ryner snatched a towel to wipe the fruit juice from her hands as Lance claimed the choicest pancake from the stack. He bit into it, then immediately regretted it.

"Hot,” he said, breathing through his mouth to cool the half-chewed bite on his tongue. Ryner, chuckling, tore off a piece of her own pancake and blew on it before sticking it in her mouth.

“Tasty,” Ryner said.

Lance, though, frowned, eating the rest of the pancake slowly. “A little dry, though.”

“You think?” Ryner asked.

Hunk stole a bite of Lance’s second pancake, then nodded. “I can fix that,” he said, and rushed over to the pantry in search of… Lance wasn’t actually sure. He pulled out an entire armload of bottles and pouches, dumping it all on the counter.

“Are we still cooking?” Lance asked, popping a slice of space apple into his mouth. “Because I’m not gonna lie, it looks like we’re about to transmute a human.” Hunk burst out laughing, though Ryner looked perplexed at the joke.

Before Lance could explain, the door hissed open, and Hunk perked up. “Keith! Hey, perfect timing. We could use some more taste buds.”

Keith slowed just behind Lance, glancing at him for an explanation. Lance grinned, skewering the next green fruit on his knife and holding it out toward Keith. “Hunk’s making pancakes.”

“ _Trying to_ ,” Hunk corrected vaguely, already sifting through his new pile of ingredients. He picked out two and added them to the rest of the batter. A few seconds later, he poured out a second batch of pancakes. Keith watched this all curiously, only looking away when Lance waved the fruit under his nose. He blinked then, pulled the fruit from the knife, and bit into it.

“Sweet,” Keith said, chewing.

Lance quirked an eyebrow. “Is that… good?”

Keith shrugged, contemplated the fruit, then took another bite. He seemed not to be able to decide whether or not he liked it, but he ate the whole thing anyway. Eh, whatever floated his boat. Lance went back to slicing fruit, though they’d almost reached the end of the stack. He tried a bit of the green fruit, which turned out to be a little bit bland. Oh, there was a little sweetness to it, like a very mild pear. It was mushy.

Lance wrinkled his nose and stuffed some of the dry pancakes in to give it at least a little bit of texture. He’d had quite enough of space goo, thank you very much.

Keith pulled a chair up beside Lance and plopped down, blinking slowly.

“Not quite awake there, Amethyst?” Lance asked, smirking.

One of Keith’s ears swiveled toward Lance, the rest of his head following a little more slowly. “Amethyst?”

Lance shrugged. “Mullet was getting old.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You should be flattered, Keith,” Hunk said, sliding a new plate of pancakes toward them. “That’s a way nicer nickname than the other ones Lance has given you.”

Keith arched his eyebrow. “It is?”

“Sure,” Hunk said, giving Lance a grin that promised trouble. “It’s a gemstone back on Earth. A very _pretty_ gemstone.”

“It’s also _purple_ ,” Lance said dryly. “Like Keith here.” Hunk managed to convey a monologue’s worth of skepticism in a single glance. Lance flicked a piece of space pear at him. “What, you wanna steal it for Shay or something?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Lance,” Hunk said, grabbing a toothpick and pinning a slice of space apple to one of the new silver-dollar pancakes. He sprinkled a pinkish powder over the breakfast kebab and held it out toward Lance. “Shay’s way more of a Topaz.”

Lance stuck his tongue out but accepted the toothpick. One bite and he’d forgotten why he was angry at Hunk to begin with. “Oh my god, Hunk,” he moaned, slumping forward onto the counter. “This is amazing.” Somewhere nearby, Keith and Ryner voiced their agreements, albeit less enthusiastically.

Hunk still frowned when he tried it, though. “Not as good as my mama's recipe,” he said. Lance winced, but Hunk forced a smile. “Lucky for me, no one’s ever tried Mama's pancakes.”

“Yeah,” Lance said, smiling weakly. “Hey, Hunk--”

An alarm split the air, startling Lance into silence. He lurched off his chair, latching onto Keith, who looked ready to draw his sword on the next person to walk through the door. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

Ryner was already heading for the door. “Bridge,” she snapped. “Coran should be on duty now. He’ll know what this is about.”

The others were already there when Lance, Hunk, Keith, and Ryner reached the bridge. They must have come straight here from the rec room—Allura’s hair was still tied up in the silk scarf she wore when she slept, Matt was favoring his bad leg, and Shiro hadn’t taken the time to grab his prosthetic.

“What’s happening?” Keith demanded, striding toward the center console. “Haggar?”

Pidge, sitting at their station, shook their head. “Rolo and Nyma.”

“ _What_?” Lance pushed past Keith, stalking up to the holomap at the center of the room. “What are they doing here?”

“You remember what Anamuri said.” Coran was fast at work at his command station. He muttered something to Tev, who darted toward the forward console.

Lance thought back to yesterday’s conversation with the _Kera’s_ commander. The finer details were a bit hazy after the whole “Shiro’s back!” tizzy. “She said she had to get in touch with us…?”

“Rolo and Nyma had to get in touch with us, apparently,” Pidge said. “They just activated a distress beacon. It’s close—not close enough for the Galra to realize we’re here, thankfully, but...” They trailed off.

“We’re going to help them,” Allura said. “Everyone to your lions.”

A few glances slid toward Shiro, but no one said anything as they headed for the elevators. Lance lingered just long enough to see Shiro reach up and touch his shoulder.

“I--”

“It’ll take too long to go back for it now,” Allura said in a hushed voice.

“I know, but I don't trust myself to fly with one hand.”

“Then I’ll fly,” Allura said. “You take my position. Watch the others. Coordinate our attack.”

Then Lance was out the door, a heavy weight settling in his chest. Rolo and Nyma, huh? _Guess I’m just never going to be rid of them._

* * *

Nyma swore as another laser rattled the _Harbinger’s_ shields. Of course this had to happen now. Of _vrekking course_. Six days of smooth flying, and _now_ the Empire found them. Now that Voltron was in sight. She checked the distress beacon again, hoping to the cosmos that someone had picked it up.

“You’re _sure_ our comms are out?” she called over her shoulder.

“I don’t know, Nyma, does it _look_ like I’ve got the castle on the line? Oh, hey Voltron, how’s it hanging?”

Nyma wasn’t going to snap. She _wasn’t_. She couldn’t help it if the enemy’s first shot had hit the comms array. It was just rotten luck—or unusually good planning on the sentries’ part. They couldn’t _know_ what the _Harbinger_ was out here for… could they?

The cockpit shuddered again, and Nyma shoved her worries away, focusing everything on the ship and the firefight around her. “Try and take out a couple of these bastards, would you?”

A grunt was her only answer, but Nyma was too busy trying not to die to complain. _Vrekking_ Empire. If they thought she was going to go up in flames now— _now_ , with so many lives depending on her—then they could go space themselves.

The next laser threatened to shatter her confidence, but then new lights filled the sky. Lasers, and not the _Harbinger’s_. A streak of red sailed past the viewscreen, and something yellow charged through a line of Imperial fighters.

“Is that--?”

“Voltron,” Nyma breathed, a laugh bubbling out of her. “About damn time.”

In seconds, the sky was clear, and Nyma followed the lions through a wormhole—the last in a nigh-endless series—to a quieter system where the Castle of Lions waited.

* * *

Lance landed Blue in the main hangar, flanking the _Harbinger._ Everyone else was here, too, and if the others were all just eager to see what was so urgent Rolo and Nyma would risk a fiery death to find them… well, Lance would take care of the precautions. A few weeks didn’t turn a bunch of thieves into heroes.

“Keep an eye on ‘em for me, will you, beautiful?” he asked, patting the console as he unbuckled himself and headed for the exit. Blue rumbled something vaguely amused that Lance opted not to hear. She would watch. She might not think she needed to, but she would watch because Lance asked her to. That would have to be enough.

The others formed a semi-circle around the _Harbinger’s_ ramp, and though it was already lowered, no one had yet appeared. Something about that didn’t sit right with Lance, and his steps slowed as he approached. Was this a trick? Anamuri had said she was sending a ship, but if that ship was the _Harbinger_ , wouldn’t she have said something? Unless it was just that much of a secret.

Figures finally appeared at the top of the ramp—too many of them. Lance automatically reached for his bayard, somehow expecting the figures to turn out to be Galra soldiers, but…

No.

“Humans?” Hunk whispered, his hands lifting toward his mouth.

Lance’s heart began to pound. He searched the weary, scarred, hollow-cheeked faces as they came down the ramp, searching for _glaes_ and pointed ears. Some corner of his mind wondered when finding a dozen or so Alteans had become more likely than finding other humans.

He didn’t have long to wonder, though, for one of the shapes had split off from the rest, a wordless cry preceding her as she sprinted forward and crashed into Lance.

“Lance! Oh my god. Oh my  _god,_ you’re alive _._ ”

Lance was already reeling from the collision, and the voice in his ear set the room whirling. He landed hard, his cousin sprawled atop him, still clinging to his shoulders and repeating the same words over and over. “You’re alive. You’re alive.”

“ _Val?_ ” Lance whispered, horrified. She shuddered, falling silent, and drew back just long enough for him to sit up. Her eyes flicked up and down once, brimming with tears, while Lance’s gaze was fixed on the fresh pink scar cutting a line across her ear.

Then she hugged him again, crushing him against her chest. The reality of the situation was only just beginning to sink in, and Lance fixated on the smallest details. The rungs of Val’s ribs beneath his hands. The borrowed clothes she wore—too long in the sleeves and legs but baring her midriff, seemingly by design. The way her hair was so much shorter than he remembered, part of her head buzzed in an undercut, the top layer falling in waves only to her chin.

She shouldn’t be here.

Lance held her, trying to remember how you knew if you were hallucinating. Something… something about ignoring the sense that was lying to you and focusing on the others. Except all his senses said Val was here, in space, with him. He saw her face, her eyes, her scars. He heard her voice, and the beginning of a sob as she breathed in desperate, heaving gasps. He felt the tremble of her hands as she held on to him, the tickle of her too-short hair against his cheek, the heat of her body. He smelled—not Val, not her strawberry shampoo or her favorite brand of facial cleanser—but stale air and sweat. He tasted…

He tasted his own tears, and finally realized he was crying.

“Val, what… how…?”

“Who’s that?” Pidge asked from somewhere nearby. Lance had to blink a few times to make them out. Shay, Ryner, and Coran had begun to draw the other humans aside, cataloging their wounds, directing them toward food and showers and medical care. Everyone else was staring at Lance and Val.

Lance opened his mouth, his fingers tightening on Val’s shirt of their own volition. “She’s my cousin,” he said, numb.

“Holy _shit_ ,” Hunk said, and Lance was inclined to agree. “ _Val?_ What are you doing here?”

Val finally pulled back, turning toward Hunk. She smiled, wiping at her eyes. “Hunk.” Her eyes darted around the room—first to Pidge, then to Matt and Shiro. “Shit,” she whispered, leaning backward on her hands. “Mrs. H is gonna _flip_.”

“Mrs. H?” Lance asked.

“Karen. Karen Holt.” Val smiled weakly as Matt and Pidge both stiffened. “She never stopped believing you were alive, you know.”

Matt paled, swaying so bad Shiro had to grab hold of him, while Pidge surged forward. “You know my mom? Is she okay? What happened? What are you doing in space?”

“Zarkon’s invaded Earth.”

Lance and Val both turned as Nyma, finally, appeared at the top of the ramp. Coran was leading the last of the refugees out of the hangar, so a profound silence greeted Nyma’s words. She looked ragged, her eyes puffy, her shoulders slumped.

“What do you mean, _invaded Earth_?” Shiro asked.

Nyma just closed her eyes. She didn’t need to say anything; there were very few ways this many humans could end up this deep in space.

The silence stretched on, Lance’s eyes drifting back to Val, who was staring at Nyma with an odd, pained expression. It was Keith who finally broke the silence, his ears threatening to lay flat as he inched forward. “Nyma?” he asked slowly, glancing past her to the dark, quiet interior of the ship. “Where’s Rolo?”

Nyma smiled, thin and wavering, but there were tears gathering in her eyes. It was only a few seconds before the sobs overtook her.

* * *

_Val rounded the corner and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun._

_She screamed, and for an instant she forgot that the thing she held was any kind of firearm. Her adrenaline singing, she swung the rifle like a club, catching the yellow-skinned alien in the side of the head._

_The woman staggered, falling against the wall, and the man behind her—a Galra, Val’s mind told her, though he didn’t wear their armor—swore and leaped back._

“ _Damn,” he muttered, sizing Val up. “This one’s got an arm on her.”_

“ _Vrekking—What was that for?” The woman caught herself on the wall, lifting one hand to her head, then pointed her gun warningly at her companion. “Don’t.”_

_He held up his hands, smirking. “I’m just saying… I think Zarkon bit off more than he could chew this time.”_

“ _She_ assaulted _me!”_

“ _To be fair,” the man said, glancing over his shoulder. “We did kind of sneak up on her.”_

_Val backed away from the pair, hands shaking. The other prisoners appeared behind her, swearing and wailing as they caught sight of the two strangers—three, Val realized. There was a robot with them, a little squat thing that chirped something incomprehensible. The other two tensed, grips tightening on their guns._

“ _Aw, vrekt,” the man groaned. “Hey, human.”_

_Val clenched her teeth. “Val.”_

_The man raised himself up, scanning the growing crowd of prisoners behind Val. “Is this… Wait, what?”_

“ _Val,” she said again, stubbornly. “That’s my name.”_

_He blinked, then grinned. “Charmed, I’m sure. I’m Rolo, this is Nyma, that’s Beezer. Now. Val. Is this all the prisoners on this ship?”_

“ _I think so.” Val glanced at the frightened faces around her. “I mean, I haven’t exactly been given a guided tour, but this is everyone who was in my cell block.”_

_Rolo breathed a sigh. “That’s gonna have to be good enough. Back to the ship?”_

_Nyma nodded curtly. As she opened her mouth to reply, someone at the back of the crowd screamed. Val smelled burning flesh before she registered the sound of lasers._

_In an instant, everything was pandemonium. Lasers continued to fly, people began to scream. Rolo and Nyma waved the prisoners down the corridor—Nyma and Beezer in the lead, Rolo bringing up the rear and firing back at the guards who had found them. All the while, the alarm continued to blare overhead._

_Val was too panicked to care that she’d lost track of Luis and Yir. She just ran, ducking every time she heard the sound of lasers, her stomach turning over as she smelled more burns. She tried not to think why that particular scent was so easy to recognize._

_Suddenly there were guards ahead of them; Val didn’t see them until something hot burned against the side of her head. Her ear was ringing, her vision going briefly white. By the time her vision returned, she was at the center of a sea of chaos. Luis had grabbed her by the arm and was dragging her along. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Everything was a roar. Nothing felt entirely real._

_They reached the hangar as Val’s hearing returned—clearer on her left side than on her right. Nyma’s voice rang out above the chaos, cursing and raging at the prisoners to get on the ship. Feet stampeded up the ramp. Somebody screamed. Luis was still dragging Val along behind him._

_Then, suddenly, he wasn’t._

_Val didn’t see the moment he fell, didn’t immediately register the absence of his hand around her wrist. She was already halfway up the ramp before she noticed he was gone, and then she turned, fighting backward through the stampede toward the body lying crumpled at the bottom of the ramp._

_Rolo was backing across the hangar, gun still firing at the Galra pursuing him. He roared something, but Val ignored it. Luis. She had to get to Luis._

“ _What are you doing?” Nyma shrieked, seizing her by the shoulder. Val fought the hold, thrashing toward Luis. She thought she might be screaming. She didn’t care._

_Rolo glanced over his shoulder. “What’s the holdup, Nyma?”_

“ _Minor freak out,” Nyma snapped. “I’m dealing with it.”_

“ _Luis!” Val cried. She managed to resist Nyma for three more seconds before she was lifted bodily off her feet and hauled, kicking and screaming, into the ship. No. **No.** Luis was still out there. She needed to get to him. She couldn’t leave him behind._

“ _They’re in!” Nyma called, and Rolo returned with an affirmative._

_Lasers continued to fill the air, flashing by over Val’s head. She was on the floor, she realized, though she didn’t remember sitting down. Luis…_

_She didn’t see the moment Rolo got shot, but she heard Nyma’s scream._

“ _Go!” Rolo yelled, his voice stiff. “Get them out of here.”_

“ _I’m not leaving you, asshole.”_

_More lasers. Val scrambled to her feet._

_Rolo had fallen twenty feet from the ship, his leg twisted beneath him. Nyma started forward, but Rolo turned his gun on her and fired close enough to her head to stop her in her tracks. The Galra were closing in around him. He shot one down, struggling to his feet, but another tackled him._

“ _Beezer!” Rolo roared, firing once more before someone wrestled his gun away from him. “Get her out of here!”_

_The robot chirped, and the ramp began to lift off the ground, making Nyma stumble and fall. She staggered to her feet, making a dive for the rapidly narrowing gap, screaming and swearing at Rolo and Beezer as Rolo was swarmed. He stared back, steady, ignoring the hands trying to drag him backward. Standing, numb, at the top of the ramp by Beezer, Val caught one final glimpse of his smile just before the door closed._

_A laser slid through the two-inch gap at the very last second, a streak of pure white across Val's vision too fast to stop before it buried itself in Beezer’s chest._

* * *

Lance and Val huddled together under a blanket in the shadow of the Blue Lion. The others had all left half an hour ago, as soon as Val gave her hasty explanation of what had happened. Lance still had questions, of course—so many questions—but they could wait. Nyma was filling everyone else in on the apparent Galra occupation of Earth, and Lance trusted them to figure out their next step.

Val didn’t seem ready to move, and Lance wasn’t about to leave her.

She’d stopped crying at some point, leaning her head on his shoulder and playing with the edge of the blanket, where the fabric had begun to fray.

“Are you okay?” Lance asked softly. “I mean really okay?”

Val breathed in, her hand stilling, then pulled back and met his gaze. Her eyes were still red from the tears, her cheek mottled with an old, yellowing bruise. She looked exhausted, but though her smile lacked the fire he remembered, it was genuine. “Not yet,” she admitted. “But I’ll get there.”

Aching, Lance pulled her closer. She said she couldn’t remember exactly how long she’d spent in the Galra prisons, but it was definitely weeks. Weeks of imprisonment, torture. Weeks of… what? Val hadn’t gone into detail on her time in the Galra prisons, just said that she’d been held there, and that Nyma and Rolo had helped her escape. Lance’s mind ran wild with the possibilities.

_I should have been there._

Lance pressed a kiss to the side of Val’s head, fighting against his rising guilt. There was nothing he could have done. He hadn’t known Earth was in danger—and even if he had, would he have gone? Would he have abandoned everyone else suffering under the Empire’s hand?

 _Yes._ _Yes I would have._ Maybe it wouldn’t have been the smartest choice. Maybe it wasn’t even the _right_ choice. But he would have dropped everything if he’d known his family was in danger.

“When did _you_ grow up?” Val teased, poking him in the side. “I swear it wasn’t that long ago _I_ was the only one who could kiss it better.”

Lance smiled, though he didn’t feel like it. “You just escaped from an alien prison,” he said. “I’ve spent the last couple months fighting a war. I don’t think either of us is the same person we were before.”

Val’s shoulders slumped. “No. I guess we aren’t.”

The elevator chimed as it arrived, the door sliding open with a hiss. Lance wasn’t sure who he’d been expecting to see—Pidge or Matt, probably, come to ask Val for more information about their mom. But it wasn’t either of them who stepped out, looking around like a thief checking for security.

“Nyma,” Val said. Her voice was bright, and when Lance looked down at her, it took him a moment to process the smile on her face. She lifted her side of the blanket, staring expectantly at Nyma, who hesitated, looking at Lance like she expected to get chased off.

And, yeah. He might have done that. If his brain hadn’t just shut down.

Seeing that Lance wasn’t going to stop her, Nyma sat beside Val, taking her hand. The blanket didn’t quite fit three, even with Nyma and Val acting like they were trying to fuse into a single entity. And then, _then_ , Lance finally recognized the odd look his cousin had been giving Nyma ever since they'd arrived.

“Val?” Lance asked, his voice cracking. He didn’t know where to take the question after that; the only possibility he could conceive of was too mystifying to be put into words.

Val understood anyway. She smiled at him. “Me and Nyma?”

Lance nodded, speechless.

“Yeah… It just sort of… _happened._ ” Val snuck a look at Nyma, flushing. “She said you two had a rocky history.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Lance grumbled. Something inside him wanted to be angry. _Nyma_. Nyma! Of all the freaking people in the whole quiznaking universe…

Then he looked at his cousin, really _looked_ at her. Her fingers were interlaced with Nyma’s, her thumb running up and down along Nyma’s thumb, and she was smiling in a way she hadn’t since she’d first tackled Lance to the ground.

Nyma glanced nervously at Lance. “Look, Lance—”

“She makes you happy?" he asked Val.

Val flushed as she looked at Nyma. "Very."

Lance nodded. "Okay."

He couldn’t read the emotions that came over Nyma’s face then, but he suspected that wasn’t the reaction she’d been expecting. Honestly, it wasn’t the reaction he would have expected. But when it came right down to it, he just didn’t hate Nyma anymore. He didn’t think he could have, after she’d saved Val in his stead, but the suspicion had been cooling even before then.

“Can I just ask you one thing?”

Nyma tensed again, but nodded. “Shoot.”

“Why did you want the Blue Lion?”

Nyma blinked, her gaze falling to the hand still holding Val’s. “Rolo,” she said. “We’ve been fighting for years to carve out a place where he isn’t being hunted by one side or the other. I thought, maybe, if I had one of the Voltron Lions on my side, I could give him that.” She laughed once, bitterly. “I didn’t realize they’d all been awakened. I figured you were just another upstart rebel who was going to get himself killed.”

Sticking his tongue out, Lance reached around Val to give Nyma a gentle shove. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, jeez.” He smiled, holding Nyma’s eyes until she returned it, then let his hand rest on her shoulder. “We’ll get Rolo back, Nyma. I swear. I’m not going to stop until he’s safe.”

“That goes double for me,” Val said, squeezing Lance in gratitude.

“You--” Nyma faltered, swearing, and ran a hand across her eyes. “You don’t have to do that.”

Lance looked at Val—alive and smiling as she wiped a tear from Nyma’s cheek. “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

The roar started in his toes, shivering in his bones for a moment before it swelled to fill the hangar. Blue had remained quiet since Val arrived, but no longer. Even as Lance realized what her roar must mean, a torrent of images flooded into his mind.

_He was Blue, watching in confusion as her paladin pulled a stranger into her cockpit. The stranger had a spark in her that called to Blue, a small, fierce flame of loyalty, a devotion to those she called her own. Blue could see this in her, the same way she saw into her paladin’s heart and knew his very nature._

_Lance was already smitten with Nyma, and Blue thought she might be as well._

_Something else lurked beneath the surge of affection—satisfaction. Red had rambled on about her plan the first night they all spent back beneath the same roof. Dual paladins. Black had been skeptical, but Blue knew at once that Red would find a way to make it reality._

_With Nyma, Blue would be the first to try this new kind of bond. That would show Red (the little showoff.)_

Lance fell back into himself with a start, blinking under the harsh lights of the hangar. “What--?” he began, onto to be swept away by another scene.

_Blue looked on in horror as Nyma handcuffed Lance to a tree._

_Betrayal._

_He’d trusted her. Blue had trusted her, too._

_Betrayal._

_Blue saw another paladin, betrayed by one she trusted. Blue hadn’t been there that day, but she’d felt it. The horror. The anguish. The end._

_**Lealle** , Blue thought, staring at Lance as he realized what Nyma had done. **Lealle. Not again.** Nyma turned toward Blue, her satisfaction thrumming in their nascent bond, and Blue saw Zarkon’s smile. She recoiled, horror and fear coursing through her circuits, and, roaring, slammed a door on the bond that had only just formed._

_Nyma froze, and Blue felt a split second of her pain before the bond withered._

“ _Hey! Let me in, you stupid cat!”_

Lance clutched his head as he returned to himself again. Images continued to trickle through the bond, but they were weaker now. Fleeting impressions. Sorrow. Grief. Nyma’s face when they’d found her at the wreckage of the rebel ship—resigned, but earnest.

She wasn’t a bad person.

Lance tipped his head back, staring at Blue as a question drifted toward him. _Is this okay?_

“You were waiting until I trusted her,” he said, the understanding sitting heavy in his chest. “You wanted her, but you weren’t going to give me a partner I couldn’t trust.”

Blue rumbled an affirmative, and Lance turned to Nyma, who seemed stunned.

“What?” she whispered. “What just…?”

Suddenly Val started laughing, the kind of teary laugh that caught you by surprise and slipped past all your defenses. It was a slightly hysterical laugh, and Val doubled over as she snorted ungracefully and clapped a hand over her mouth. “Oh my god, Nyma,” she wheezed. “You didn’t—you didn’t tell me you _handcuffed my cousin to a tree!_ ”

Lance’s mind went on strike again—a feeling that was becoming entirely too familiar after today. He stared at Val, then up at Blue, who _oozed_ satisfaction.

“What was _that_?” Pidge demanded, striding in with Allura.

Lance stared at them, a slow, delighted grin tugging at his lips. “I think I just found the other blue paladins,” he said.

It took a second for that to hit them. Allura looked first to Nyma, Pidge to Val. Then both did a double-take, gaping at Lance. “Pala _dins_?” they said in unison.

Lance buffed his fingernails on the blanket draped over his shoulder. “What can I say? I’m just that special.” Blue purred amusement inside his bones.

Allura continued to stare at him, slack-jawed, while Pidge grinned, a look of absolute glee on their face as they glanced at Nyma, at Val, at their joined hands, then back to Lance.

“Well,” Allura said, clearly fumbling for composure. “All right then." She coughed, her eyes darting back to Lance's new partners. "Good timing, I suppose?" She shook her head, blinked a few times, and re-focused on Lance. "Coran needs to run a full diagnostic on the castle, but once that’s done we’re leaving.”

Lance frowned, his smile fading as his heart began to pound. “Leaving?” he asked, hardly daring to hope. “Where… Where are we going?”

“Earth,” Pidge said, still beaming. Their eyes shone with unshed tears. “Lance, we’re going _home._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few notes:
> 
> (1) In case you were curious or had trouble visualizing it, [this is the reference I'm using for Shiro's new prosthetic.](http://www.oandplibrary.org/popup.asp?frmItemId=CCCC12B5-38B3-47C3-9490-B475C7991E72&frmType=image&frmId=16)
> 
> (2) VAL. Yes, I know, I'm evil, leaving her on a cliffhanger that wasn't actually a cliffhanger for so long. The truth is, she's been free since about 24 hours before Shiro was taken by Haggar. And since I didn't want her story getting stretched out across nine chapters, I saved it up, and now it's getting its own side story. If the first chapter of _[Stars Burn Out](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11106234/chapters/24783363)_ wasn't up when you started reading this chapter, it should be up now that you've finished, with the rest following later this week. It's an exploration of Nyma's backstory, Val's PTSD, and how, exactly, they fell in love. (Because let's all be honest here: this fandom is sorely lacking in femslash hurt/comfort, and I am here to deliver.)


	25. Tension

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Shiro emerged from stasis to teary reunions all around. Matt gave him the new prosthetic arm he'd built--an arm powered by a piece of the Black Lion's core. The paladins spent the rest of the day relaxing, and late that night, Shiro and Matt had a conversation about Shiro's time in the Arena. The next day started out as just another day of R&R, but then the Harbinger arrived, with Nyma, Val, and fifteen other human refugees on board. The Mendoza cousins were finally reunited, Nyma told the paladins about the Galra invasion of Earth, and Lance discovered that both Val and Nyma are also blue paladins.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Reminder that _[Stars Burn Out](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11106234/chapters/24783363)_ is up (and complete at 20k!), if you're looking for the fallout from Val's imprisonment, boatloads of Rolo  & Nyma feels, and two lost, scared girls falling in love with each other.
> 
> Warning for a flashback (italicized section) and resulting panic attack.

> **Project Robeast Research Logs  
>  ** Entry –  
>  Dated –

**Pidge’s Notes:** I can’t do this anymore. I just—I can’t. There are entries for all the robeasts we’ve fought. Aurel. Simsill. The thing we fought on Maorel. The lions that attacked Keith and Matt. (Did you know they were twins? Haggar wanted to see if using pilots who knew each other well would make the robeasts cooperate more efficiently.)

I’ve read the same story a dozen times now. Pick a test subject. Inject them with sQ until their body _just_ starts to shut down. Shove an Evil Bayard in their brain so they don’t get any big ideas. Build a giant death monster and force them to bond with it. Unleash on the unsuspecting universe.

I’ve found references to four robeast labs in the notes, but no mention of where they're located. Three more labs like the one we destroyed on Maorel. Three more labs—that’s gotta be, what? Fifty or so robeasts still out there, waiting to kill us? I mean, fuck, it’s sick, but… When I read that more than half the pilots die before the druids even start thinking about building the robeast, for just a second all I could think was ‘thank god we don’t have to fight them all.’

We need to stop this. We need to stop Haggar.

* * *

“Are you sure about this?” Shiro asked. The bridge was quiet, most of the screens dark. Coran had dived right into the final checks he needed to make before the Castle of Lions struck out for Earth, Wyn hovering beside him. The boy looked up now, frowning at Shiro, who stood near the door, watching the Alteans work. Allura was at the central hologram display, coordinating with Zelka, who had her team working on a few last-minute repairs downstairs.

Allura looked up now, frowning. “About what? Going to Earth?”

Shiro hesitated, but it had to be obvious that he’d stayed on the bridge for a reason. Allura had already returned from filling in Lance and Val on their plans (and brought the surprising news that both Val and Nyma had, apparently, been chosen by the Blue Lion.) The other paladins were all off getting breakfast, or else preparing in their own way for the return to Earth.

And here Shiro was, frozen on the edge of the commotion, his heart pounding against his ribs.

“Yes,” he said. “It could be a trap.”

It was a weak excuse, and everyone knew it. They’d had this conversation once already, when Nyma had laid out the situation back home. A warship in orbit around Earth, human prisoners being taken from the surface—with Iverson’s help. The thought made Shiro want to punch something. He tried not to think about how long this Commander Vanda had been there, considering Berlou had reported no signs of activity in the area, considering the Kerberos mission may have been a sham from the very start.

Allura glanced at Coran and Wyn, frowning. “We are aware of the risk,” she said slowly. “I thought we all agreed it was one worth taking.”

Shiro sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. He still hadn’t found the time to go back to his room for his prosthetic, and its absence made him feel unbalanced. “You were planning on looking for New Altea next,” he said, avoiding all three sets of eyes. “I know you were.” They needed to get Wyn home, after all, and even if he didn’t know how to get there, they had to at least try.

“New Altea is not the one under siege,” Coran said. “It can wait.”

Shiro’s eyes darted to Wyn.

“We already offered to take him to Anamuri,” Allura said. “They stand just as much chance of finding New Altea as us. He said no.”

Wyn huffed, leaning back against the console beside Coran. “I don’t want to go,” he said, pouting. He looked at Shiro and blushed, going on in a mumble. “I want to stay with you.”

Allura smiled, Coran ruffled Wyn’s short curls, and Shiro felt another vice close around his stomach. Seeing this, Allura’s smile faded. “We lost our home to Zarkon’s lust for power,” she said, voice cool. “We will not allow the same to happen to Earth.”

And she was right—they all were. Shiro swallowed down his rising panic and nodded. He turned toward the door, focusing all his willpower on keeping his breathing steady as he walked away. The door slid open at his approach, but before he could leave Allura had him by the elbow.

“Shiro,” she said, sounding pained. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s nothing,” he said quickly. “You’re right. We have to save Earth. I should go get ready.”

“Shiro...”

Coran came up on Shiro’s other side, Wyn trailing behind him, and Shiro squeezed his eyes shut. He didn’t want to have this conversation. Not now. Not so soon after Haggar had taken him, when Shiro still felt like the lightest tap might shatter him.

“It’s been eighteen months,” he said. He wanted to keep quiet, but he knew if he didn't volunteer at least part of the truth, Allura and Coran would pry more out of him that he was willing to give. So he spoke—slowly, haltingly, trying not to give away the depths of his baseless fears. “I guess I’m just nervous about what I’m going to find.”

“Understandable,” said Coran, patting his shoulder. “I imagine you’re feeling much the same as we are about New Altea—a little excited, a little frightened.”

“Homesick,” Allura said softly. “And worried that the home you find won’t be very much at all like the home you left behind.”

A knot of emotion had lodged itself in the back of Shiro’s throat, and it took him a long while to find his voice. He supposed he ought to have expected Allura and Coran to see to the heart of the matter. “More than that,” he finally said, staring straight ahead, “I’m afraid _I_ won’t be very much like the man they lost.”

He’d been through so much, seen so much, _done_ so much. He hardly recognized himself, and that was before he looked in the mirror. When he found his parents, would they even know him? Would Akira?

“I’ve survived by not thinking about them,” he admitted, feeling dangerously close to tears. “I used to think about home a lot, back when I was first captured. I tried to keep myself sane by thinking of what was waiting for me back on Earth. Then I stopped believing I would make it home, and ever since I made it out, I--” He cleared his throat. “It’s too much.”

“You’ve changed since you left home,” Allura said, leaning her head on his shoulder. “We all have. But you’re still _you_. I’m sure your family will welcome you back with open arms.”

Her words were soft and laced with pain, and Shiro was keenly aware that Allura and Coran had no families to return to. Not on Earth, not on New Altea. He felt terribly insensitive for coming to them with this, of all things. Surely they would have given anything to be in his shoes.

But he’d come this far already. He might as well see it through. “I’m not going to go looking for them. Not until we’ve defeated Zarkon.”

Allura jerked back, looking stunned, and Coran gaped at him. “What? Why?” Coran asked.

Shiro threaded his fingers through his bangs. “Because,” he said. “If I do… I’m not sure I’ll be able to leave. I’m not sure I’ll be able to force myself back into this war.”

“Shiro,” Allura said, her eyes softening. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“But I--”

She silenced him with a finger on his lips. “I’ve been thinking it over since Val and Nyma arrived, and I’ve decided to give you—all of you—the option of staying on Earth with your families.”

Shiro stared at her, his lips parted in surprise. He couldn’t have heard her right. Stay on Earth…? “But—Zarkon—”

“Forget Zarkon for a moment.” Allura wrapped her fingers around his hand, tugging it away from his hair. “None of you knew what you were getting into. None of you got to choose. Keith, Shay, Ryner—they chose this. Coran and I have been committed to this fight for a long time. The rest of you, though? You were thrown into this. The others chose to follow the Blue Lion without any knowledge of what it would mean. You were pressed into this war and only allowed to choose the side on which you fought.” She met his eyes. “If any of you choose to remain on Earth—even you, Shiro; _especially_ you—it will be with our blessing.”

_Stay._

The possibility left Shiro breathless. He hadn’t dared to consider it before, not really. It had always been inherently wrong. To leave? To abandon the fight? To let Keith keep doing this alone? To let Allura shoulder the burden of the black paladin without him? And what if the others chose to continue on—Matt and Pidge, Hunk and Lance? Could he walk away, knowing they were still out here, risking their lives?

He didn’t know if he could. But for the first time, he let himself imagine what that would be like. To sleep in his own bed, without worrying that he might be woken up at any moment by a Galra attack. To eat his mother’s miso soup, to play _go_ with Akira, to take a walk, breathe in the familiar scents of Earth.

He wanted that so badly it ached, but the guilt followed close on the heels of the desire. Aside from Allura and Ryner—and perhaps Nyma, now—he was the oldest of the paladins. He was the last one who should consider tapping out.

“Thank you,” he said to Allura, forcing a smile that curdled his stomach. “I’ll be sure to let the others know.”

Allura and Coran seemed to recognize this as the end of the discussion. Both sighed, but they stepped back, letting Shiro walk off the bridge without further arguments. He was grateful, both for the offer of an end to the fighting, and for not pushing too hard. Because accepting Allura’s mercy and staying on Earth would have been so easy.

He took the long way back to his quarters, walking empty stairwells that echoed with his footsteps as he tried to get his thoughts in line. His one consolation was that he wasn’t likely to run into his family when they reached Earth. The paladins had only two targets: first the Garrison, to see whether Iverson had any Galra troops in position for a ground assault; second, the ship in orbit, to free any remaining prisoners and to eradicate the aerial forces.

Most of Shiro’s family lived in Japan, his parents in Ohio. Akira surely would have left the Garrison after Shiro’s disappearance, and even if he hadn’t, his contracts had rarely kept him anywhere near Carlsbad.

None of them would even know Shiro had returned.

* * *

Matt was just about to dive into a stack of Hunk’s pancakes when Shiro finally found his way to the kitchen. He paused, adjusting his prosthetic, and glanced around. Val and Lance had just gotten back from checking on the other refugees, who were being taken care of by Shay and Ryner. Pidge was off getting the mind-meld headsets to facilitate Val’s retelling of the adventures of, as she called them, “Mama Holt’s Army” (Matt would have laughed at that, except he very much believed his mother capable of attracting a minor militia.) And Hunk was just putting the finishing touches on his much-delayed breakfast.

Keith and Nyma had both disappeared somewhere in the chaos, and Matt had already resolved to track down Keith with a plate of pancakes if he didn’t show up soon. The only reason he hadn’t left already was that he was mostly sure Keith was trying not to upset any of the former prisoners, much the same way he’d avoided Wyn at the start, and any attempt to convince him to be social would be met with stony silence.

At least Shiro was here. Matt patted the empty stool beside him, and Hunk passed over a plate of pancakes and fruit as Shiro sat. Shiro smiled, distracted, and only seemed to notice the meal when he tasted the first bite.

“This is good,” he said, surprised, and Matt couldn’t help but laugh as Hunk preened.

“Hey, you know,” Hunk said, making a stack for Pidge and then one last plate for himself. “Now that we’re headed back to Earth, I can stock up on _real_ food. I can have spices again!”

Matt grinned around a mouthful of space pear. “Can’t wait.”

Shiro glanced toward the door as Pidge came bustling in with a box full of headsets, bouncing with energy and heading straight for Val. Lance headed them off, grabbing the box and holding it up out of Pidge’s reach. Pidge pouted, but let themself be diverted by food.

Shiro cleared his throat. “Actually, I was just talking with Allura.” He didn’t quite manage to sound casual, and he kept his gaze on his food, which he chased around his plate with a spoon. “She wanted you all to know that after we’re done with this battle, after we’ve made sure the Earth is safe… You can stay if you want to.”

Dead silence followed this proclamation, and for all Shiro went on staring at his food, trying to act as though nothing were wrong, Matt saw the way his shoulders tensed. He could imagine how Shiro had reacted to the news when Allura told him. Their extended absence from Earth and the longing to go home that sometimes threatened to smother them had been common topics of conversation when insomnia had them both in its grasp.

“We can… stay?” Lance whispered. He seemed not to notice that he’d reached out for his cousin’s hand, but she was squeezing back just as tight, white-knuckled fingers trembling. “Just like that?”

Shiro finally looked up, taking in the wide eyes all around him. “Just like that,” he said. “You don’t need to decide now, of course, but think about it. You’ve all done amazing things out here, but there’s no reason you have to sacrifice more.”

And of course Shiro wasn’t including himself in any of those statements. That was only to be expected, Matt supposed. And it was a little bit of a relief, to be honest. Matt would rather not be the last human stuck out here—though thinking like that did make him feel just a little bit selfish.

Pidge recovered first, smiling as they sawed off another bite of pancakes. “Man, Mom would love that. To finally have us back...”

Matt’s heart clenched. “You’re right,” he said. “You should probably stay with her.”

“ _I_ should?” Pidge scowled at him. “What do you mean _I_ should stay?”

Stomach flip-flopping inside him, Matt stared at his food, though his appetite seemed to have deserted him. “We don’t have to talk about this now.”

“Screw that.” Pidge pushed their plate away, ignoring the concerned looks coming at them from all sides. “You’re not planning on staying on Earth, are you?”

“Pidge...”

“No! Look, Matt, I get it.”

Matt closed his eyes, feeling sick. “I really don’t think you do, Pidge.”

Pidge made a low, angry noise. “It’s about Dad. Right? He’s still out there somewhere, and you don’t want to go home until you find him. Well, guess what? Neither do I.”

Matt glanced around, but the shock and guilt on Hunk and Lance’s faces only made him want to puke more, and Shiro--

Matt ran a hand down his face. “It’s not just that, Pidge. I can’t—Even after we find him, I can’t--”

“Can’t what?” Pidge demanded. “Can’t back down from this fight? Sure you can. It’s easy. You of _all_ people, Matt. You deserve to get away from Zarkon and Haggar and everyone who--”

“I _can’t_ go home, Pidge,” Matt snapped. He tried to stop there, but the dam he’d built when he heard they were going home was thin at best, and this was just what he needed to shatter it. “I can’t _ever_ go home. Not for good.”

No one was staring at Pidge now. They all had their eyes fixed on Matt—even Val, who hadn’t made much of an effort to butt into the conversation since she’d arrived. Their alarm, their pity, hit him like an avalanche, and he leaned his elbows on the counter, gripping his hair.

“What do you mean?” Pidge asked, their voice small.

Matt hadn’t wanted to get into this. “The crystals,” he said, the words fighting against his teeth as he forced them out. “No matter what we try, they keep growing. I’m never going to be able to go more than a couple of weeks without Shay’s healing. What am I supposed to do? Ask her to stay on Earth until I die? To never see her family again?”

He shook his head. Thoughts of the future had been stewing in the back of his mind for the last few days. For longer than that, really, but the crystals scars on his face and the unfamiliar blue of his left eye had driven the truth home. When this war was over, the best he could hope for was to find a Balmera to settle down on. He figured if he went with Shay there was a good chance Hunk would at least visit from time to time. If they could get reliable use of a wormhole generator and a ship, he might even be able to split his time between Earth and the Balmera. He could see his family, and maybe Shiro would be content to only visit Earth once or twice a month. Maybe Matt would be content to only see Shiro that often.

Through the shocked silence, Val finally spoke up. “Did you say… crystals?” she sounded breathless, and Lance instantly turned toward her.

Matt just shrugged and waved toward his face. “Yup. The Galra packed me full of them, and now they’re slowly taking over my whole body.” He laughed bitterly. "Welcome to space, right?"

Val’s spoon dropped from trembling fingers. “Shit,” she whispered, covering her mouth with one hand. The other still held onto Lance’s, and he winced as she squeezed his fingers. “I didn’t think—I mean, I _did,_ but I hoped—I— _shit._ ”

“What?” Matt asked, suddenly on edge again. “What’s wrong?”

“The crystals,” she said, taking a deep breath to steady her voice. “I thought those scars looked kind of like crystals, but I didn’t think—I mean, none of _us_ have scars like that.”

Matt blood ran cold, and he had to swallow before he could force himself to speak. “Us?”

“The refugees. That’s what they were doing on the prison ship. Implanting us with crystals. Turning us into living batteries.” She touched her shoulder, wide eyes riveted to Matt. “They called it Project Balmera.”

* * *

_Project Balmera._

_Matt had heard the words floating around the prison complex the last few days, mostly when they had him drugged up and strapped to the examination table. Reaching hands, glinting scalpels, whispering voices. That was his world now, and he couldn’t figure out how Project Balmera fit in._

_Couldn’t figure it out until the day they dragged him from his cell, slapped a patch on his arm to keep him woozy, and steered him closer to the heart of the Vel-17 research lab than he’d ever been before. He watched the cell block slip away, stumbled, blinked through the daze as they walked right past the labs and operating rooms where they usually took him._

_They were going to kill him._

_It was the only thing that made sense to his drugged brain, but he couldn’t move himself to be afraid. At least if he died, this would all be over._

_But it wasn’t a gun he found waiting for him at the end of a hall that seemed to continue for far too long. It was a hangar, and inside was a pod only a little smaller than the_ Persephone. _Were they taking him somewhere?_

_The world fuzzed, and the next thing he knew he was strapped into a padded seat that reclined just enough to make him feel like he was falling… falling…_

__"Are you sure he's stable enough for this?"_ _

_Someone leaned over him. Checked his restraints. Matt groaned, and the Galra laughed._

_"The boys over in Hovent Sector don't need him alive. As long as his corpse makes it, we've done our duty."_

_They were going to kill him. But… no. The Galra retreated, one by one. The last one typed something in to the dashboard of the small shuttle, then patted his cheek as she retreated. “Have a nice flight, 5N,” she said. “And have fun with Project Balmera.”_

_Then he was flying. Falling. A swirl of light all around him, a flash of blue sky. An impact._

_He woke strapped to another table in another room with sterile white walls and monsters all around him. Only these monsters weren’t purple-furred and yellow-eyed. These were monsters he knew. Monsters who’d smiled and wished him luck as he boarded the_ Persephone _with Shiro and his father. That was James Virgil standing guard by the door. That was Riley Townsend leaning in with a scalpel and a smile that slipped past the rim of his surgical mask._

_“Just hold still,” Riley whispered as he cut into Matt’s shoulder, just above his collarbone. He traded the scalpel for a pair of forceps and pried loose a chunk of bloody crystal that glowed even in the bright lights overhead. “Good. That’s good. Almost done now, shh.”_

_Matt blacked out as Riley began to sew the incision shut._

* * *

Matt didn’t remember standing. Didn’t remember knocking his stool over as he backed away from the counter. His back was pressed against the wall, and his lungs didn’t seem to remember how to take in air.

“Matt?” Pidge asked, their voice swimming to him from across a great distance. Shiro was closer, murmuring his name over and over, waving the others away as they tried to close in. Shiro knelt in front of Matt as he slumped to the floor, shaking, his vision going dark around the edges.

“I never escaped,” he whispered. He pulled his legs to his chest and buried his face in his knees, trying to remember the way he’d learned to breathe when he was hyperventilating—in through the nose for a count of three, out through pursed lips.

It didn’t work, not until Hunk took Shiro’s place in front of Matt and urged him, “Breathe with me, Matt. Come on.”

Matt tried, but all he really managed to do was turn his shallow, fluttering breaths into shuddering sobs. His shoulder burned where Riley had cut into him. It was the same place the Galra had cut him the first time to insert the crystal, though the Galra incision had left a much fainter scar.

 _It probably happened in the crash_ , Pidge had said, and Matt had gladly believed that the sutures had been the Garrison’s way of trying to fix him up. Better that than the truth.

“I never escaped,” he said again when he felt a little less like he was going to pass out. The room still spun around him, but he could lift his head and look around at his friends. His eyes stopped on Val, who was holding her shoulder in just the same spot as Matt. “The Galra sent me back to Earth. They must have needed the crystals in me to kick-start Project Balmera.”

He saw the moment Val connected the dots. She reached up with shaking hands to pull aside the collar of her shirt, revealing a scar that was virtually identical to Matt’s. A little thinner, a little fresher.

It meant the same thing.

“Go talk to Shay,” Matt said, something inside him collapsing. “She’ll be able to help you.” After a few seconds of silence, she stood, urged on by an ashen-faced Lance. Matt lifted his head just before they passed out of the room. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, and then they were gone.

* * *

Pidge stayed with Matt for a while after breakfast, but they could tell almost immediately that he didn’t want company. So they left him in Shiro’s care and wandered off in search of distraction.

Distraction, it turned out, that they found in the form of Hunk.

He was waiting outside the med bay, where Lance, Val, and Shay were holed up. Pidge slowed, their thoughts of getting some mutual distraction out of Lance evaporating. “They kick you out?” Pidge asked.

Hunk looked up, surprised, and rubbed the back of his neck. “Not ‘kick out,’ exactly, but… yeah.” He hung his head and kicked at the ground. “I was being maybe a little too antsy about it. Val’s wound tight enough as it is, and Lance is even worse.” He fell silent, but Pidge knew what he didn’t want to say; the same guilt bubbling in Pidge’s gut clenched Hunk’s jaw.

“I should be able to help Matt,” they said, leaning back against the wall beside Hunk. “I mean, he’s my brother. I know him better than anyone. Shouldn’t I be able to make him feel better?”

Hunk silently reached his arm over Pidge’s head and pulled them into a hug. They didn’t fight it. After all, Hunk and Lance were basically brothers, too. Hunk must have felt the same way Pidge did. It was frustrating—a brand of frustration Pidge was becoming all too familiar with these days. They wanted to help. Not just help Matt. Help all their friends. But they didn’t know how to make Matt’s or Shiro’s ghosts go away, didn’t know how to make the loss of Altea hurt Allura and Coran any less. They could sometimes make Lance less—well, not any less homesick, but at least less lonely.

They wished they could do more.

“We’ve got an hour to kill,” Hunk finally said, his eyes sliding to the infirmary door. “Wanna go do some pre-flight checks on the lions with me?”

“Anything to get my mind off of… everything.” Pidge took a deep breath and let it out. They tried to focus on the giddiness they’d felt when Allura said they were going home—not on the ache brought on by the knowledge that Matt was stuck out here, not on the sympathetic nerves his panic attack had triggered.

 _We’re going home_.

In a few hours, they could be in their own house, hugging their mom. Maybe it wouldn’t be permanent, not yet, but it was more than they’d had for the last few months. Longer than that, really. Aside from a few weeks between terms, they hadn’t seen their mom face-to-face since enrolling at the Garrison.

“I’d forgotten how much I miss my mom,” Pidge said as they walked with Hunk toward the elevator. They could feel Hunk’s eyes on them, though they pretended not to notice. “It sounds awful to say it out loud, but it’s true. I… haven’t really thought about her since we got stuck out here. Mostly when I miss someone, it’s my dad.”

“Makes sense to me,” said Hunk. “He’s the one you’re looking for.”

“Yeah, and all this time Mom’s been looking for _me_.” Pidge huffed, thinking about what little Val had told them about what was going on back on Earth. Pidge’s mom confronting Iverson, gathering allies, digging for the truth. Akira was in on it too, and Hunk’s uncle. They wondered if Matt would think to tell Shiro about Akira. Pidge itched to know more, though they supposed they'd know plenty in just a little while.

Hunk sighed, shoving his hands into his pockets. “We’ve had other things to worry about,” he said. “And I don’t know about you, but if I’d spent all this time thinking about home, I probably would have broken down way before now.”

Hunk was probably right. And it wasn’t like Pidge had never thought about their mom. There were nights they dreamed they were back home, back before the Kerberos mission. There were days they ate Hunk’s cooking and thought about how their fridge was probably still full of nothing but old takeout and frozen dinners for one. They usually shoved those thoughts away so they could focus on the war, on the search for their dad, on whatever was desperately in need of repairs this time.

Now there was none of that. The paladins were headed home. And Pidge honestly just wanted to cry.

The hangar wasn’t empty when Pidge and Hunk arrived; the sound of hushed voices drifted out to greet them. Pidge glanced around, searching for the source of the sound, but with five lions plus the _Harbinger_ in here, it was a little cramped. Frowning, they stared forward, peering into the dark spaces beneath the lions. The Galra kids sometimes hung out with the lions, especially Edi—and recently, Wyn.

“...almost ten standard now,” said one of the voices, which Pidge suddenly recognized as Nyma’s. It was low and mournful, a far cry from Nyma’s usual combative tone.

Pidge’s feet had already set a course for the _Harbinger_ , assuming they would find Nyma inside, but as they came around the curve of the Yellow Lion’s tail they spotted two people sitting together on Red’s paw, backs against her leg.

Keith had his legs stretched out in front of him, in contrast to Nyma, who seemed to be trying to make her long limbs take up as little space as possible. Frowning, Keith rubbed the hilt of his dagger, where the Galran word for loyalty was etched. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “If there’s any chance at all--”

“He’s already dead, and you know it.”

Pidge froze, as much from Nyma’s snappish tone as from her words, and Hunk was only half a step behind. Keith’s ear twitched anyway, and he looked up at them, offering a weak smile.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “Time to go already?”

Nyma’s shoulder’s tensed, and she tried, not very subtly, to wipe at her cheeks before she looked up at them. Her all-violet eyes didn’t turn red to give away that she’d been crying, but they were big enough and dark enough that Pidge didn’t need to look hard to see that they were still wet with tears.

“Were… you talking about Rolo?” they asked.

Nyma scowled and glared at the wall.

Sighing, Keith watched her for a long moment before saying, “Yeah. Talking about the plan.” Pidge’s chest ached. The plan wasn’t much more detailed than dividing up teams—the humans and Allura were heading down to the Garrison to get a handle on the situation, while the other paladins infiltrated the prison ship. Nyma had claimed she was worried Vanda and Iverson might have taken new prisoners in the last week, but they’d all known she was hoping to find Rolo.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” Hunk said, smiling reassuringly at Nyma.

But Pidge didn’t need to see the way Keith’s ears drooped, or the way Nyma curled even tighter, to know that neither of them were expecting a happy ending.

“Hunk...” Keith said, eyes once more on Nyma. He seemed to be waiting for a signal from her, but when none came, he sighed and continued anyway. “Zarkon doesn’t… He doesn’t look favorably on people who defect. He doesn’t want the rest of the Galra getting any ideas. If you don’t fit the mold, you’re sent to a prison world. If you fight back or try to run away… you die.”

“Oh,” Hunk said. “But...”

Keith shook his head. “Best case scenario, Rolo’s still alive only because someone higher up than Vanda wants to kill him personally. In which case he’s probably already been moved. More likely...”

“More likely they shot him in the head while I ran away like the coward I am,” Nyma hissed, pawing again at her eyes. Keith gave her a pained look, but didn’t interrupt as she began to rant. “It's his own damn fault, you know. He's the one who wanted to play hero. We both knew the risk we were taking, stealing from the Empire, flying around in one of their own ships. But that wasn't enough for him. Oh, no. He wanted to _help people_. You know, he always said he was glad he didn’t have to worry about getting tortured or some shit.” Her chin trembled for a moment before she bared her teeth and leaned her head back against Red’s leg with a thunk. “Point is, Rolo’s dead. I’m not going in there for him. I’m going in there to kill the bastards who took him away from me. Who took _everything_ from me."

There was a raw note in her voice that stopped whatever sympathy Pidge might have offered. Hunk seemed to be debating going to give Nyma a hug, but he held off—probably wise, Pidge thought. Nyma might have skinned him alive if he tried.

Keith glanced sidelong at her, then sighed. “Do you want to ask them--?”

“No,” Nyma snapped.

Keith’s ear flicked once. “Why not? They can’t possibly make things worse.”

“Make what worse?” Hunk asked.

Nyma shot a glare at Keith, then rolled off Red’s paw, giving it a good kick as she rounded it and set off toward the _Harbinger_. Red growled after her and without turning, Nyma flipped the lion off. Pidge wondered if she’d picked that up from Val, or if it was just a universally offensive gesture.

Keith sighed, but followed Nyma up the _Harbinger’s_ ramp, gesturing for Pidge and Hunk to follow. They did so, a little wary, and kept quiet as Nyma led them to a corner of the cargo hold that remained untouched by the explosion of blankets, clothes, and dirty bowls the refugees had left behind. They wound their way through stacks of crates and storage lockers, and then Pidge saw him.

 _Beezer_.

They gave a cry of dismay at the sight of him, dark and quiet, an ugly hole burned through his center. “Oh, no,” they said, darting forward. “What happened to him?’

“He got _shot_ , what does it look like?” Nyma growled. Pidge looked up, ready for a fight, but backed off at the pain in Nyma’s gaze. “Guards got him just before takeoff. I took a look at him, but Rolo was always the one who handled his maintenance. I know enough to keep my ship in the air, and that’s about it.”

Grimacing, Pidge carefully pried off Beezer’s front casing to get a look at the internal damage. It was one thing if the laser had hit the power supply, but if it had hit Beezer’s memory banks?

After a few minutes of careful examination, Pidge turned to Hunk. “Could you go grab my tools—and Rover, if he’s there? It’ll help if I can talk to Beezer as I’m fixing him up, and Rover will be better at that than Earth tech.”

“Sure,” Hunk said, giving them an encouraging smile as he stood up and hurried out of the ship.

Pidge turned to Nyma. “You have anything to clean him out with?” they asked, tactfully ignoring the way Nyma looked like she wanted to be sick. Pidge got it—sometimes tech was more than just a machine. Especially when it could think for itself. Pidge had seen a lot of horrible things in this war, but very little had hit them as hard as walking into the hangar the first time after the battle against the Black Lion and seeing what their virus had done to Green and Black.

Pidge fervently hoped they never had to see Green’s guts spilling out of her like Beezer’s were now.

Pidge had most of the char and melted metal cleaned away by the time Hunk returned with Pidge’s tools, Rover bobbing along at his shoulder. The little drone gave a pitiful wail at the sight of Beezer, and Pidge absentmindedly patted his crown as they got to work.

It was a long, slow process to fix Beezer up, but fortunately none of the damage was irreparable. A few minutes of study turned up a ruined power core and a fried CPU, but when they connected Rover all of Beezer’s memory seemed just fine.

The first thing to do was to rig up a new power supply using one of the crystals that had come out of Matt. Pidge was slowly getting used to having them around for tech projects. No one had yet figured out exactly how they differed from ordinary Balmera crystals—like Balmera crystals, Matt’s grew and withered in their raw form based on the flow of Quintessence but maintained their shape and size once cut. Unlike Balmera crystals, Matt’s were incredibly efficient at storing energy. Honestly, Beezer was going to have a way longer battery life after this. Pidge would probably need to fiddle with his charging station, but that was a problem for later.

With power taken care of, Pidge moved on to the CPU. This, too, had to be replaced. Fortunately, they’d been collecting parts from bots they ran into—Galra sentries and drones, the broken-down critters they sometimes found gathering dust in abandoned corners of the castle-ship, random skeletons dug up on swap moons…

They spent a good ten minutes just sorting through their stockpile while Nyma told Keith about how Rolo had liberated Beezer from a posh clothing store back when Rolo was just a kid and Beezer was a glorified cash register—sans cash. Rolo had pieced together most of Beezer’s inner workings himself, which was obvious now that Pidge could see more than just the scar tissue. There was a cobbled-together feel to Beezer’s innards, but he’d obviously been cobbled-together with great care.

Pidge didn’t blame Nyma for feeling like Pidge’s patch jobs were a violation.

Eventually Nyma fell silent, and Pidge finished up the last few connections. They disconnected Rover, took a deep breath, and powered Beezer up.

“Is he…?” Nyma began.

Pidge didn’t answer. They were pretty sure that--

Yes. Pidge let out the breath they’d been holding as Beezer’s screen flickered to life. A string of startup text scrolled across it, and then it went briefly dark before a glowing blue circle appeared, flattening to a line a few times in imitation of blinking.

He buzzed a question, and Nyma muttered something that sounded more than a little teary-eyed. Pidge backed off as she strode forward, dropping into a crouch in front of Beezer, her forearms resting on her knees. She blinked a few times, spilling a new string of tears, then reached out and poked Beezer in the center of his screen.

“Hey zap-brain,” she said, fondness winning out over exasperation. “I thought we agreed no heroism.”

Beezer spat a series of noises that still didn’t sound anything like any robot language Pidge had encountered (possibly because Rolo had improvised that along with everything else), and Nyma laughed.

“You know, that’s a funny story,” she said, settling back on her heels. “I might have become a paladin while you were out of it.” He buzzed at her, and Nyma narrowed her eyes. “Hey! Watch it, you little junker, or I won’t introduce you to Blue.”

Pidge smiled, but didn’t resist Hunk’s pull toward the door. They knew a little bit of privacy was appreciated after you’d almost lost someone important.

But Nyma turned as the other three started to leave. “Wait, hold on,” she said, standing and hurrying after them. Keith paused beside Pidge at the door, Hunk a few steps down. Nyma slowed a few paces short of them, folding her arms across her chest. “Thank you,” she said. “For helping. I’m sure you had other things to be doing.”

“Not really,” Pidge said, shrugging. Nyma smiled like she didn’t really believe it, but Hunk just ducked between Keith and Pidge and lifted Nyma off her feet in a hug.

“You’re part of the family now, Nyma,” he said, setting her down. She staggered, looking a little stunned by the experience. “Get used to it.”

“Just like that?” she asked, skeptical.

Keith snorted. “Trust me, Hunk doesn’t tease when it comes to things like this.”

Hunk grinned, his hand darting out to ruffle Keith’s hair. Keith ducked aside, laughing, and put Pidge between them as a shield. Pidge rolled their eyes, but nodded to Nyma. “What they said.”

Nyma’s eyes softened, and she shoved her hands in her pockets, leaning her shoulder against the door frame. “Guess I’d better get used to it, then. Good luck down there.”

“You too,” Pidge said. “And… don’t give up just yet. I know it’s hard. I’ve been looking for my dad for more than a year now, and I’m not about to give up. So even if you don’t find Rolo, we’ll keep looking.”

A smile tugged at her lips. “Funny. Lance said the same thing.”

“Then you know we mean it.” Pidge shrugged, then turned and headed down the ramp, lifting their hand in a wave. _Let Rolo be okay,_ they thought as they went. _Rolo and my dad. We can save them, at least. Can’t we?_

* * *

“How’s it coming in here?”

Val craned her neck to look toward the door—not an easy thing to do when she was laying face-down on an exam table with a (surprisingly gentle) rock-giant massaging her back. Honestly, though, she didn’t really need to look to recognize Shiro’s voice; he sounded an awful lot like Akira.

It wasn’t the voice, per se. More the cadence. The way his words came out crisp and precise (the Garrison’s influence, probably), the inflection he used, the word choice. _How’s it coming?_ Not, _how’s it going?_ or, _how are you feeling?_ or, _everything all right?_

Not that Val was any expert on linguistics or dialect or anything. She just listened. A lot. And she could hear the history Shiro shared with his brother.

She could also hear his hesitation, so she propped herself up on her elbows and turned a little more to give a small smile to the pair at the door. Matt was here, too, pale and tired-looking, his eyes fixed on his shoes. One hand rested on his shoulder, near the scar so much like her own; the other held Shiro’s hand in a white-knuckle grip. Just as well the hand he was squeezing was metal.

Val stared at him for a long while, taking in the effects of his crystal infestation—his eye, and the crystallized skin near it. Shay had already assured Val that she was nowhere near that stage. Matt had apparently had an unfortunate run-in with raw Quintessence—and a lot of it.

That didn’t make any of it less unsettling.

Still, one thing was crystal clear (pun damn well intended, because she needed some way to cope with this shitty situation.) Matt was trying to blame all this on himself, as if by being the first victim, he was somehow responsible for what came after.

Shay’s hands were still roving along Val’s arm in search of errant crystals, but she stopped when Val laid a hand on hers. “I’ll be right back,” she said, then swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood, and crossed to Matt. “You look like you could use a hug.”

For a second, Matt only gaped at her. (What, had he expected her to smack him?) Then he chuckled and accepted her offer. “Okay, now I see the family resemblance.”

Val arched an eyebrow at Shiro, who stood behind Matt, smiling fondly. “Lance has been turning into a little bit of a mother hen lately,” he said.

Behind Val, Lance squawked. “I am not!"

“Sure, Lance,” Matt said, pulling back from Val with a sniffle small enough she could pretend not to have noticed. “You just make sure we’re all eating and sleeping and generally taking care of ourselves because you don’t care.”

“Damn right I don’t,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He still sat in the chair beside the exam bed, trying his hardest to look uninterested. Like Val didn’t know him better than that. He’d been known to take care of their babysitter when she was having a rough day—when Lance was _six_. It only made sense that he would have offered this team the same kind of emotional support.

Val made sure to ruffle Lance’s hair on her way back to the bed, then dutifully sat still as Shay continued her examination.

“So what’s the prognosis, doc?” Matt asked Shay, obviously trying not to let his worry show through.

Shay hummed thoughtfully. “Val’s crystals have not had very much time to grow, and I don’t think she has been exposed to much excess Quintessence. I have drawn out what crystals I could, and I will have to continue to watch for signs of an acceleration, but I do not think she will experience much in the way of symptoms.”

Lance breathed a sigh, his shoulders slumping. “Well that’s good to hear.”

Val nodded, though she found it a little harder to relax. She’d thought six days with Nyma on the _Harbinger_ would have been enough to get her used to the many potential perils of space, but in reality all she’d grown used to was _that_ ship and _those_ perils. Now she was on a bigger, more high-tech ship with more aliens, and… She didn’t want to say it was terrifying, but it was a little terrifying.

But Lance was here. Whatever else she had to say about the castle, Lance was here.

He smiled at her, a little wistful, like he could tell what she was thinking. Hell, for all she knew he _could_. Paladin of Voltron. Who knew what that meant for him. What it meant for her, god. This was going to take some getting used to.

“So, what, are we ready to go?” Val asked, wrapping her arms around her bare midriff. (She would have to see about a change of clothes before they did much else. Nyma’s shirts were great for giving Shay access to the evil crystal tumors, but not so much for feeling like she was covered. Especially now that her cousin and his friends were here. It hadn't felt this awkward when it was just Nyma.)

Silently, Lance shrugged out of his jacket and draped it around Val’s shoulders. She started, blinked at him, then pulled the jacket around herself. She’d forgotten how soft this thing was—softer now that it had been through a war.

“Soon,” Shiro said. “Not quite yet, I don’t think. We just wanted to see how you were doing.”

Val tipped her head to the side, studying him. “Uh-huh...”

Shiro flushed, but Matt just rolled his eyes. “We did want to check in on you, but we were also wondering what you meant when you said that they’re turning us into batteries.”

“Oh,” Val said, her good mood faltering. “That. I… Nyma would know more about it than me. She’s the one who saw the files on it. I was just guessing. I guess they wanted to use us to power their ships.”

Matt closed his eyes, swearing that alien swear Val had heard so many times from Nyma— _vrekt_. She wondered what it meant. “I should have known that’s what they were after.”

“What do you mean?” Shay asked.

Matt rubbed his forehead. “Oh, stuff I’ve seen in Keith’s head.” He waved his hand, and the others all nodded like looking into people’s heads was totally normal. Good lord, what had she gotten herself into now? “Zarkon’s on the edge of an energy crisis. The Balmera are dying off, and his empire’s so big he needs to start expanding his fleet, and he can’t. He doesn’t have enough crystals.”

“So he wants to use humans,” Lance whispered. “Damn.”

“No.”

There was a sudden, loud _pop_ , and Val turned to see Shay holding the remains of what looked like a Capri Sun pouch—now with a gaping hole in the side and clear liquid dripping from her hand. Shay scowled and tossed the pouch in the trash. Then she looked up, her yellow eyes burning.

“No,” she said again. “I will not let them do to your people what they have done to mine. We are going to stop this. Today."

* * *

Naomi ran, her breath coming short as she ducked between buildings. The sun had long since set, and the Garrison’s perimeter floodlights cast long shadows across the campus. Not for the first time, Naomi regretted this whole ruse. Oh, sure, it gave her access to information she never would have seen otherwise—damn important information, too, especially this time.

It also meant she had to rely on silly outdated tactics, like running and phone calls.

Rounding another corner, Naomi swiped at her screen and brought up her contact list, jabbing the entry labeled C. Catering—Eli Kahale—and lifting the phone to her ear. She didn’t dare list Karen’s team by name in her phone, just in case someone swiped it, so she’d improvised: C. Catering (The “C,” of course, stood for “conspiracy”), Counselor, and Prof. S.

“Come on, Eli,” Naomi muttered, picking up the pace again. “Come on, answer me.” She’d already tried Karen, but her call had gone straight to voice mail. Voice mail! For the love of--

Naomi should have been a hacker.

The thought of her old crew hearing her say that made her smile despite the situation. She’d always been a woman of action—or at the very least, sweet-talk. They might have expected espionage from her, _maybe_ , but hacking?

Eli’s phone went to voice mail, too, and now there were shouts behind her. Too close behind her. Naomi rattled off every curse she knew in five languages. She’d wasted too much time already. Iverson might have put his plan into motion by now. Karen and Eli—not to mention Hunk’s mothers—could already be dead.

“God zangt mierda!” she wheezed. Well, there. Congratulations, Iverson. He’d made it so she couldn’t even swear properly.

She hung up halfway through Eli’s voice mail recording and nearly broke her phone screen dialing Prof. S.--Akira Shirogane. He’d be at Naomi’s house (where everyone should have been from the very instant Naomi had realized Iverson was tossing the law into a black hole and going his own direction.) But even Akira was closer than Naomi was just now.

“Naomi?” Akira said. He was groggy— _sleeping_? Now? It was barely eleven! “What’re you--”

“Shut up and listen,” Naomi hissed. “Iverson’s done fucking around. He’s on his way to Karen’s house—Akira, you have to get to them. I’m not going to--”

Something small, hard, and white-hot connected with her ribs, and for a moment Naomi lost her train of thought.

When her head cleared, she was on the ground. She took stock of the situation at once—nothing broken, all her senses still working. She didn’t know where her phone had gone, and the darkness wasn’t helping.

The darkness—Naomi froze for an instant, casting around her for signs of her attacker. Had he seen her face? Did he know who she was? She collected herself, smoothed her features, got her feet under her—or tried to. Someone was standing over her, and even as she moved to stand, his boot came down on the small of her back.

“Well, well,” said Commander Iverson as he pressed her body deeper into the dust underfoot. “Would you look at that? I think I’ve just caught myself another mole.”

* * *

“Akira, you have to get to them. I’m not going to--”

Naomi cut off with a gasp, and the spell that had frozen Akira in place shattered. “Naomi?” he hissed. “Naomi!”

No answer.

Akira swore, spinning around as he searched for his shoes—his keys—his gun. Where had he left his gun? He had no clue what was going on, but where Iverson was involved, Akira wasn’t inclined to take chances. He called Naomi’s name one last time, and then the line went dead.

Resisting the urge to hurl the phone across the room, Akira yanked his shoes on, then sprinted to the guest room in the back of the house where Naomi had put him up. He yanked the dresser drawer off its track, spilling socks and boxers and sports bras everywhere. Akira’s pistol thumped to the ground in the middle of it all, the box of ammunition landing atop a pair of socks nearby. Akira snatched both up, then sprinted for the garage.

He dialed Karen’s number as he peeled out onto the street, but he wasn’t surprised when she didn’t pick up. She had work tomorrow, and she usually went to bed early. Lana and Akani, too, were early birds. Akira dialed Eli, the only one of them who might still be up. His SUV veered across the center line, and Akira twisted the wheel as an oncoming car blared its horn.

Eli’s phone rang four times, then went to voice mail. Akira watched his speedometer creep ever higher. He prayed he didn’t run into any cops on the road tonight, because there was no way in hell he was sticking to the speed limit.

_You have to get to them._

Naomi’s last gasp rang in his ears, and he tried not to think about what it meant. Tried not to think about the fact that he couldn’t get a hold of any of his friends. (They were sleeping. Eli had silenced his phone so he didn’t wake the others. That was all. It had to be.)

Karen’s house was dark and quiet when Akira arrived. He turned off his headlights at the end of the street, though he didn’t see any strange cars parked out front. The door was still locked, and Akira fumbled with his keys until he managed to insert them correctly.

He had his gun up as he entered, his finger hovering beside the trigger. The house was dark and quiet, no sound but Akira’s own pounding heart and the rush of his breath as he struggled for calm. He headed for the stairs, wincing as they creaked under his weight. There was a light somewhere ahead of him—not the yellow glow of an incandescent bulb, but the colder blue light of a computer screen. Eli.

Akira scanned the hallway as he reached the top of the stairs, then inched toward the open door, bracing himself for the worst.

“Holy--!” Eli sat on the bed, his face ghostly in the light coming off his laptop. He clapped a hand to his chest as Akira entered the room, lowering his gun as he finally started to breathe again. “Dammit, Akira, you gave me a heart attack!”

“Sorry,” Akira said, spinning a quick circle. “Have you heard anything?”

Eli frowned. “Headphones,” he said, lifting them off his head. “Why, were you calling?”

“No. Come on.” Akira didn’t wait for Eli to respond, just headed back out onto the landing and pounded on the door to the master bedroom. “Karen! Lana, Akani! Get up! Hurry!”

Muffled shouts, curses, and the sound of feet hitting the floor answered him, and Akira closed his eyes, giving himself one more, brief moment to feel the crushing weight of relief. They were all okay. He hadn’t been too late.

“Akira?” Karen asked, storming out of her room. She wore her green satin pajamas and a gray cardigan pulled over top, and she looked ready to tear him apart. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Naomi called,” Akira said, waving them all toward the stairs. “Iverson’s apparently decided it’s time to eliminate the opposition.”

Karen was halfway through a snarky comment about Naomi Smith, but she snapped her mouth shut as Akira’s words sunk in.

“I don’t know what he’s planning. I think someone attacked Naomi while we were talking.” He grimaced, skipping the last step and landing hard on the tile floor of the entryway. “We’ll have to figure out what happened to her, but first we need to get you out of this house.”

To their credit, none of them tried to gather clothes or phones or anything else. They’d been through this once before with Akira, so they all just stepped into whatever shoes were close at hand, then gathered around Akira as he pulled out his car keys.

As he reached for the door knob, a bullet shattered the front window, and Karen went down screaming. _  
_


	26. Relativity

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Voltron was on its way to Earth, but before they arrived, Matt and Val had a chat about Project Balmera. Pidge took some time to fix Beezer, and they (together with Hunk and Keith) officially welcomed Nyma to the team. Shiro's afraid to return home--and afraid he won't be able to leave again if he seeks out his family. It doesn't help that Allura has extended the offer to all the humans to remain on Earth after this battle is over.
> 
> Back on Earth, Iverson put his plan into motion, sending a squad of hitmen after Karen and the Kahales. Naomi managed to get a warning to Akira before she was caught sneaking around the Garrison, and Akira went to Karen's house, but as they were leaving, the attack began and Karen was caught in the crossfire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special warning for gun violence this chapter. Not much more graphic than is typical for this fic, but it gets intense (especially because, at least for me, things are a little more visceral when it's humans with guns and ordinary bullets instead of lasers and such.) Characters on both sides of the firefight get shot on- and off-screen, including in the torso and, in one instance, in the head.
> 
> For more details, go [here.](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/162024022244/tumblr_ortjm56MbO1ttvln6) (Be aware there are a few spoilers at that page, including who lives/dies, but as always, I'd rather spoil one or two plot points than cause you unnecessary stress.)
> 
> Alternatively, if you don't want the spoilers, you can skip the worst bit easily enough. Stop reading at "A blur of dusty gray." Skip that paragraph and the two that follow and jump back in at, "[Character] took a single step back."

Two hours after hearing Nyma’s report on the invasion of Earth, Coran finally finished the last of his pre-flight checks. The Castle of Lions was back in working order and ready for battle.

Well, ready enough.

There was a familiar pressure building in Hunk’s chest as he gathered with the rest of the team on the bridge. It was part anxiety, part homesickness, part adrenaline. He could hear the Yellow Lion rumbling in his head, and he thought, maybe, he could feel a little bit of Shay’s profound concern, too.

Allura glanced around the bridge as Shay arrived with Lance, Val, Shiro, and Matt. “That’s everyone,” she said, nodding to Coran. “Are you ready?”

“On your mark, Princess.”

Allura breathed in, and Hunk felt his nerves rise and fall in time with the sound. “All right, paladins,” Allura said. “You all know the plan. Ryner has command of the rescue. She’ll take the second team in on Green once the rest of us have made our move.”

Shay nodded, Nyma pursed her lips, and Keith, who was dressed not in paladin armor but in the silvery armor of a Galra soldier, flashed a thin smile. He looked strange dressed like that, never mind that it wasn’t all that much different from what he’d been wearing a few months ago when Hunk first met him. Actually, it was _weirder_ than what Keith’s old armor would have been. This outfit didn’t have the vibrant red decorations that marked a commander, which Hunk could have at least accepted as a mark of his lion.

But he’d pulled this armor out of Nyma’s stash of disguises, figuring a commander suddenly appearing on Vanda’s ship would draw way more attention than just another foot soldier. He held the helmet under his arm for now, but once he donned it, he would look just like any other Galra, if a little scrawny.

It was clear that knowledge made Keith uncomfortable. Aside from acknowledging Ryner’s command, he kept his gaze on the ground, fingering the standard-issue rifle he carried to complete the illusion. He had his sword and dagger both sheathed at his waist, but ordinary Galra soldiers didn’t generally fight with a blade.

Hunk drifted around the circle of paladins as Allura outlined the rescue plan—quiet infiltration, Keith leading the way and making sure the other three stayed out of sight. Ryner would hack the system computers, Shay would watch her back, and Keith and Nyma would go to any prisoners Ryner found while Ryner copied the Project Balmera records and uploaded a virus Pidge had designed. Two hours after Ryner uploaded it, it would wipe the ship’s computers, erasing everything Vanda had on her pet project. That gave them two hours, tops, before Vanda realized they were here and sent out her attack dogs—which was why Ryner wasn’t going in until the rest of them were already at the Garrison. It was a narrow window, but it should give the other team enough time to do some recon on the surface and get their families to safety before all hell broke loose.

“Hey,” Hunk whispered once he reached Keith’s side. “You doing okay?”

Keith glanced at him, bristling. One look at Hunk’s face dissipated his anger, however, and he sighed. “I’m fine.”

Hunk frowned at the tension in Keith’s words. “You know, you could still switch with Allura. She can impersonate a Galra soldier just as well as you.”

Keith’s eyebrows shot up at the word _impersonate_ , and Hunk smiled back, letting Keith take that however he wanted. Rather than respond to that, though, Keith just shook his head. “I need to go after Rolo. And Shiro was right. I know how the army works better than anyone. I stand the best chance of getting them through there without blowing cover.”

“You do,” Hunk said, nodding, as Allura moved on to the other half of the plan, which was even more bare-bones than the rescue. She and the humans were going to the Garrison, where they were going to try to get into the top-secret bunker Val had found. With luck, they would find information about the state of the Galra invasion Vanda might not have on her end. Iverson’s plans, troop locations, something to indicate how far the corruption spread. Not knowing what they were going to find, they were counting on a lot of improvisation, which was why Shiro and Allura were both on the ground team.

As Allura wrapped up her briefing and ordered Coran to open the wormhole, Hunk clapped a hand on Keith’s shoulder.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “Vanda might be fooled by some stolen armor, but the rest of us know better. You’re still you.”

Keith stiffened, not quite looking at Hunk as he smiled. “Thanks,” he said.

“He’s right, you know.” Shiro appeared suddenly behind Keith, jostling his shoulder as he stepped up beside him. Keith staggered, then scowled at Shiro, who only grinned. “Besides, you’re too short to really be convincing.”

Keith looked down at himself, eyes widening, and cursed softly. “ _Vrekt._ You’re right. Maybe Allura should--”

“Woah, woah.” Shiro grabbed Keith by the shoulders before he could run off in a panic. “Keith, _breathe._ It was a joke.”

For another moment or two, Keith remained tense. Then he breathed out. “Sorry. I’m just...”

Shiro ruffled his hair. “You’ll do fine.” He paused for a moment as Keith made a face and smoothed his hair. Then Shiro leaned in close and smirked. “You know, I heard Lance was pissed he wasn’t going to get a chance to stick it to Vanda.”

“We’re still going to have to fight her when this is all over,” Keith said, frowning.

Hunk caught Shiro’s eye and grinned. “Sure,” he said. “But we probably won’t be going back into her ship. It’s not as personal from the outside. You’ll have to make sure to deliver a big screw you from Lance while you’re in there.”

Keith narrowed his eyes, glancing from Shiro to Hunk and back. “I know what you’re getting at,” he said. “And you’re wrong.”

Shiro lifted his hands in surrender and backed off. “I’m not getting at anything. Just offering you a little bit of motivation.”

Still scowling, Keith shot a glance toward Lance, who stood with Val and Nyma near the viewscreen, watching light swirl around the castle as they hurtled across the universe. His expression softened for just an instant before he glanced self-consciously at Hunk and Shiro and jammed his helmet on his head.

“Shut up,” he muttered.

Hunk grinned, but the respite from the nerves didn’t last long. As the otherworldly light of the wormhole faded, he felt a surge of shock and horror from Yellow—no, from _Shay._ He turned, heart in his throat, and caught sight of the Earth. It looked just like everything he’d ever seen on TV, just like the little flash of blue and green he’d seen as the Blue Lion raced them off to the depths of space.

“ _Dead?_ ” Matt whispered, horrified. “What does that mean? How can it be _dead?_ It’s _Earth._ ”

Hunk tore his gaze away from the viewscreen to where Matt stood with Pidge near the hologram display of the Earth. There was utter silence on the bridge as everyone stared first at Matt, then at the small red icon hovering just above the model of the Earth that clearly proclaimed the planet dead—just as Vel-17 was dead, just as Haggar’s weapon had killed Yaltin, had tried to kill Berlou.

“No,” Hunk said, feeling dazed. “No way. There’s gotta be some mistake—right?” He glanced around at a ring of stunned faces.

“You mean we’re too late?” Lance asked, horrified. “Zarkon’s already--?”

“No.” Hunk clenched his fists at his side, the panic clawing at his throat. “We destroyed Haggar’s weapon. She _can’t_ drain the Quintessence out of a planet anymore.”

Matt laughed humorlessly. “Since when does losing a toy stop Haggar? She could have built a new weapon.”

“So quickly?” Shiro asked. He shook his head, glancing toward the Alteans, who were whispering together near the nav computer. “What is it?”

Allura looked up, her brow furrowed. “There must be something wrong with the navigation systems. It says we’re in the Hovent Sector.”

“We are,” Nyma said. “At least, that’s what the Galra rebels told us. Project Balmera. Hovent Sector. The coordinates brought us here.”

Keith nodded. “Earth is the only inhabited planet in this sector. That’s why no one bothers to come out this way.”

“You don’t understand,” said Coran, running his fingers through his hair. “Hovent—this planet—there shouldn’t _be_ life on Earth at all.”

The anxiety had Hunk’s heart in too tight a vice for him to be properly shocked by Coran’s words, so he just held up a hand and squeezed his eyes shut. “No, hold on. _What?_ ”

“There shouldn’t be life on Earth,” Coran repeated. “It’s not possible.”

Lance broke away from his cousin and stalked toward Coran, frowning. “You can’t just say something like that, Coran. _Why_ shouldn’t there be life on Earth? Cause, uh, last time I checked there was a whole damn lot of it!”

Coran’s eyes darted to Allura, who was still staring at the computer screen. She must have sensed Coran’s stare, though, for she looked up, returned his stare, and sighed.

“Zarkon’s armies have been here once before,” she said. “Ten thousand years ago.”

Coran held up his hands as all the humans began clamoring for an explanation. “It was near the start of the war,” he said. “Zarkon was still a paladin at the time, though I couldn’t say for sure whether or not he’d already decided to betray us. The Galra armies had been attacking small settlements and primitive worlds. There was one such planet in the Hovent Sector— _this planet_. It was an inconsequential world, really. Ah, no offense. But it had no major civilizations to speak of, no valuable resources, no technology, not even any neighbors who might stake a claim to it.”

“But there were _people_ here,”Allura said. “There was art and culture. There were farmers. They had domesticated animals.” She looked around the room, her eyes burning. “We might have overlooked it if the Galra had come to sponsor the inhabitants of this planet, to trade with them. To live together with them in peace.

“Instead, they sought only to conquer.”

Coran called an image up on the viewcreen—an image of Earth not so very much changed from what they saw now. No city lights visible in the night, more ice at the poles, but still clearly Earth. Hunk’s heart thudded in his chest.

“Voltron came to the planet’s aid,” Allura said softly. “My father tried to reason with the Galra, but they would not be swayed. We fought, and when the Galra realized we would not let them slaughter an innocent people, they… They unleashed a weapon like nothing we had ever seen. It was more magic than technology, and it—it poisoned the planet’s crystal core somehow.”

“It was a slow death,” Coran said. “The planet was no longer producing Quintessence, but it still had a considerable store, and it wasn’t heavily populated. Our scientists theorized it would take at least a thousand years for the planet to die. We had only begun to search for a way to undo the damage when Zarkon betrayed us.”

Hunk glanced from one Altean to the other, his head spinning. “So you’re saying Earth’s been dead for almost ten thousand years? But that’s--”

“Impossible?” Allura asked. She glanced at Coran, who glanced at Matt.

Oh. _Oh._

“We produce more Quintessence than we need,” Matt said, sinking down into the nearest chair. “You thought we were like Alteans, storing up Quintessence, able to draw on it during times of stress—or when we left our planet’s atmosphere to explore our solar system. But that’s not quite right, is it? We’re not Alteans. We’re--”

“Balmera,” said Shay, her voice hushed. “Your planet is dead, so you humans produce the Quintessence your planet needs to survive.”

Hunk felt something flutter in his stomach—not quite nerves and not quite awe. It was a little of what he’d felt when he first came to the Castle of Lions and realized just how small the Earth was. It was the thrill and the terror of finding out what you knew didn’t even cover half of what there was _to_ know.

Except it was worse, because this was something he hadn’t known about his own species.

 _No wonder Zarkon wants us for his batteries so bad,_ Hunk thought, feeling light-headed.

A few moments of silence passed, and then Allura straightened. “Now isn’t the time for this discussion. The Earth is no more dead now than it was when you left. The only threat to its safety is Zarkon’s forces. So let’s focus on that for now and deal with the rest of it another time.”

Shiro nodded. He still looked shaken, but he’d collected himself more than had the rest of them. “She’s right,” he said firmly. “Extraction team, be ready to launch. The rest of us are in Black.” Hunk was confused for a moment, part of him wanting Yellow’s stability. It was the shock, he supposed. It was the shock that made him forget the plan—Yellow, Blue, and Red were staying up here in case the rescue mission turned south and the others needed the extra firepower, or Vanda started the battle before the ground team was finished with their work.

Shiro glanced around, then nodded. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”

* * *

Shiro landed the Black Lion in the mountains just inside Garrison property, hidden in a steep-sided gorge where she wouldn’t be seen from the air. The seven of them climbed out and up with the help of their jet packs—aside from Val, who was dressed in a standard Altean battlesuit, as Coran hadn’t had time to synthesize a complete new paladin set for her. The Altean armor was every bit as tough as what the rest of them wore, but less clunky, lighter, and without the extra gadgets like jet packs and built-in computers.

Still, Shiro didn’t hear Lance complaining about having to carry her to the top of the ridge, where they all paused for a moment, staring out over the familiar landscape painted in warm tones.

Shiro pulled off his helmet, letting the wind wash over him and breathing in the crisp mountain air. The day was cool, the sun hardly above the horizon. The younger paladins had tried to keep track of the date on Earth, though it was difficult on the castle-ship with the constant shift in day-night cycle that resulted from traveling between worlds. They thought it was late fall, though. The tail end of October, or maybe early November. Seemed about right to Shiro.

Lance laid a hand on Shiro’s shoulder, his gaze turned out over the desert. He held his helmet in his free hand, and his eyes, when he finally turned them toward Shiro, were misty.

“We made it,” Lance said with a crooked smile. “We’re home.”

Shiro nodded, a bubble of emotion threatening to burst. He’d seen vistas like this since becoming a paladin. he’d felt the wind in his hair and seen a sun just like Earth’s in the sky overhead. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that something about this was tangibly different. It was the way other planets they’d visited were just a little bit smaller than Earth, or just a little bigger, so the gravity pulled on him differently. It was air that felt too thin or smelled of unfamiliar flowers or refracted light differently, making everything seem ever-so-slightly unreal.

This was _home_ , and Shiro swore he would have known it for truth even if he hadn’t seen the planet from above.

“Almost home,” he said, glancing at his friends. At Hunk and Val, who hovered just behind Lance, looking close to tears as they squinted against against the sun rising above the far horizon. At Matt, who kept hold of Pidge’s hand as Pidge scaled a small rock spire for a better view.

“I think I can see my house from here,” they said, grinning cheekily in a way that almost hid their own tears. Lance and Hunk laughed at the feeble joke, and Matt squeezed his eyes shut.

Shiro turned to Allura, who watched them all with a sad smile and nostalgia in her gaze. “Okay,” Shiro said. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m ready to do this.”

The others nodded as one, even Val, who carried no weapon. There had been no time for even basic self-defense training, and she’d complained that it felt strange to wear even this minimal armor. She hadn’t put up any real argument about the armor, though. For all they were hoping this reconnaissance mission would remain quiet, no one was willing to take chances.

They set out at a steady pace, Lance once more carrying his cousin, the rest of them using their jet packs to control their descent as they dropped from the ridge to the foothills and then to the wide, flat desert below.

It was still a considerable hike to the Garrison proper, for though Shiro had brought them down as close to their destination as he could and still hide the lion, the New Mexico desert was not a place where cover was easy to come by.

By Shiro’s understanding, they were near the place where the others had first found the Blue Lion, which put them about two miles west of the Garrison complex.

“At least it’s a nice day,” Lance said brightly as they started walking. Val laughed, Pidge glared at the sun like they expected it to heat up out of spite, and Matt laced his fingers through Shiro’s and smiled. Funny, Shiro thought, how this could feel so easy, so _light_ , when an enemy was waiting up ahead.

But they were home, or nearly so, and Shiro could have fought an entire fleet without breaking a sweat.

The euphoria didn’t last forever, of course. After ten minutes of hiking across sun-baked dirt, the laughter tapered off. One by one, the paladins put their helmets back on so the armors’ climate regulator systems could do their jobs. Shiro was the last to cave, closing his eyes and letting himself feel the wind and the sunlight of his home planet for just a little while longer before retreating to the artificial coolness.

When the first brick buildings appeared in the distance, the air grew taut with unspoken tension, and Allura hailed Coran to let him know they had reached their destination.

Memories pulled at Shiro’s mind—nearly ten years of memories, tied up in those old, sun-bleached bricks and the dark roofs. In the handful of flowerbeds and transplanted trees in the public area to make cadets’ families feel more at ease with leaving their children behind. He’d only been seventeen when Akira snuck out in the dead of night and ripped up half a flowerbed just to greet Shiro in the morning with a celebratory flower crown for making fighter pilot— _and top of the class, too! Showoff._

Everyone seemed to be breathing harder as they neared the complex, and Shiro didn’t think it was exertion. He had happy memories within those walls, but all of them were tainted now by the Galra hovering overhead. He kept wondering how long Iverson had been working with them. He kept wondering when, exactly, Iverson had picked Shiro and the Holts to be sacrifices to the Galra Empire.

The bittersweet nostalgia only lasted to the edge of the complex, where a million points of dissonance flared up around them: a chain and padlock on the gate to the visitor lot, graffiti on the walls of the administration building and dorms that had been scrubbed away and painted over, leaving patches of glaring white and ghosts of brighter colors underneath. Shiro’s foot caught something on the ground that jangled as it spun away from him, and he looked down at spent bullet casings—more than a few of them, mostly clustered near the padlocked gate.

“What the hell?” Pidge whispered.

Shiro felt light-headed, but he kept his voice level as he spoke. “It… It looks like there was a riot or something.”

“Rubber bullets?” Matt asked, crouching beside one of the casings. Shiro couldn’t tell if that was a deduction or a plea.

Val blew out a long breath. “Looks like Mrs. H has been busy.”

That pulled a smile out of Pidge, though it quickly faded. Everyone else kept low as they darted toward the back half of the complex, away from the dorms and academic buildings. From the angle of the sun and the hush lying across campus, Shiro guessed it was a weekday, and all the cadets were in lecture or running simulations. Most of the officers would be busy, too, which boded well for the paladins’ improvised infiltration.

Still, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the whole place was deserted. It had the feel of a post-apocalyptic movie, that sense that a place should have been inhabited but wasn’t.

It made him uneasy.

They skirted a dorm building near the southwest corner of campus, and Shiro caught a flicker of black ink. A poster, he realized when he turned to look. Cheaply printed, probably on the academy computers, with a grainy blown-up version of the official portrait of the _Persephone_ crew. Shiro faltered at the sight of Sam. Of Matt, smiling the bright, eager smile he’d worn so often before all this.

Of Shiro himself, younger than he was now, with short dark hair and no scars on his face, wearing a pilot’s dress uniform and standing at attention.

He looked more like Akira than himself.

Somebody had added a thin black bar across Shiro’s eyes, and in the empty space beside him, there were words typed in a bold, severe font. _The pilot’s only error was trusting the Garrison._

Shiro didn’t realize he’d stopped moving until he felt a hand on his arm. Allura, with Matt and Val close beside. Shiro hastily stepped back, forcing out a laugh as a tangle of emotions he didn’t have time to identify roiled inside him.

“Sorry,” he said, but Matt only smiled, his eyes darting past Shiro to the poster.

“Damn,” Val muttered. “I shoulda thought of that.”

Lance’s voice suddenly spoke up around the corner, a whisper pitched high enough to carry. “Holy—what _happened_ while we were gone?”

Shiro spun, forgetting the poster and dashing for the corner. He expected to find Galra, to find a sea of dead bodies, to find _some sign_ of the war that had come to Earth. Instead, he saw a wall full of pictures, some printed in black and white, some printed on glossy photo paper. Photos of all sizes, some blurry, some crisp. Lance, Pidge, and Hunk smiled up from all of them, sometimes in uniform, sometimes in casual clothes. Lance’s photos had more variety than the others, and many featured people with Lance’s bright blue eyes or with Val’s dark curls. Shiro wondered if they’d been taken from Lance’s Twitter or Instagram, or whatever other profiles he had. Hunk had fewer candid shots, Pidge only their Garrison portrait and a picture of them and their mother with Sam and Matt from the publicity shoot for the Kerberos mission—both of these repeated dozens of times until they were represented as often as Hunk or Lance.

The pictures were all layered over each other, and Shiro caught glimpses of ripped photos underneath, torn corners where someone had tried to take down the memorial. It looked like the whole wall had been painted white at some point—painted right over the photos so the brick showed through where the corner of a photo had been peeled away. But dozens more photos had gone up since then. _Hundreds_.

The the bottom of the wall in black spray paint, someone had scrawled, _Remember._

Pidge backed up, their hands clapped over their mouth, until Matt caught their shoulders. Hunk was clutching Lance’s arm, and Lance looked like he might burst into tears at any moment.

Before he could, a gunshot rang out across the campus. Shiro ducked, automatically trying to activate his arm before he remembered himself and reached for the pistol at his waist. He’d brought a dagger along, too, in case he needed to create a buffer for the others, but this was the Garrison. He doubted he’d have a chance to close to short range before somebody put a bullet in him.

“Where did that come from?” he hissed, turning around. The way sound echoed off the walls, it was difficult to pinpoint the origin of the shot.

Allura was already moving. “This way,” she said, just as three more gunshots sounded in rapid succession. The others summoned their bayards, Matt’s taking its pistol form, and Lance fell back with Val as they charged toward the source of the commotion.

“Careful,” Shiro hissed as they ran. “We don’t shoot until we know who’s on our side and who’s the--”

They rounded the front of the command post and came within sight of the bunker Val had described to them as the place where she’d overheard Iverson talking to Commander Vanda. Two guards in uniform crouched behind the barricades in front of the bunker entrance, and a young man in street clothes had taken cover just this side of the checkpoint, gun in hand, blood seeping through the sleeve of his shirt.

The bottom dropped out of Shiro’s stomach, and he was charging toward the firefight before he had time to remember his own advice.

* * *

The cockpit of the Green Lion was eerily silent as they headed toward the prison ship in orbit around the Earth. Keith’s attention ricocheted around like a laser in a room full of mirrors, darting from the planet visible outside—the first glimpse he’d had of the planet he’d heard and read so much about—to the ship up ahead and the prisoners waiting inside, to Nyma, tense as a spring about to snap at what may or may not await them inside, to himself, and to the armor he wore.

Hunk and Shiro had helped more than Keith would have thought possible, but he couldn’t help feeling on edge as long as he wore this armor. It wasn’t a wholly unpleasant sensation, either, which surprised him. Because he _didn’t_ feel at home in the regalia of the Galra Empire. He _didn’t_ feel like the person he’d been—or rather, he felt every bit as stifled and out of place as he’d felt growing up.

He’d never belonged there, and as uncomfortable as he felt dressed in the armor of the enemy, it was a sharp reminder that the Empire _was_ the enemy. Zarkon had never owned Keith.

He glanced at Nyma, who clutched a rifle in two hands, her jaw set in determination. Coran had set the castle to make a spare set of paladin armor for each color back when it first became obvious that dual paladins were a possibility, and Nyma wore hers now, though Lance still carried the blue bayard.

“It suits you,” Keith said, earning himself an odd look from Nyma. He gestured to her armor. She looked less approachable than usual, which Keith wouldn’t have thought possible, but she also stood taller and carried herself more confidently. Keith had seen glimpses of her rebellion days in her before—in her, and in Rolo—and that was on full display now. “Blue knew what she was doing when she picked you.”

Nyma scoffed, but one corner of her mouth lifted in a smile. “Quit trying to flatter me and focus on the job, would you?” she said dryly.

Keith just chuckled, then lifted his stolen rifle to a ready position as Ryner aligned with an abandoned loading dock. Green ran a scan, and as soon as Ryner gave him the go-ahead, Keith was moving, plunging into the prison ship and stepping outside the dock to stand guard.

“We’re clear,” Ryner said over the comms, her voice hushed. “Green’s cloak has twenty-five minutes.”

Keith glanced both ways down the corridor, then rapped his knuckles on the door behind him. “Then let’s move.”

Ryner, Shay, and Nyma crept out after him, and the four of them darted down the hallway in the direction of the computer bay Nyma had found when she was here with Rolo. They hadn’t had time to copy the files before Val’s prison break had set off alarms, and they’d only been able to read a basic summary of Project Balmera, but Nyma was positive there was more information to be found.

It felt strange to be here with so few allies. Keith was used to having backup on the front lines—Matt, Shiro, Allura. Even Pidge. Now he had Shay watching their backs and Nyma and Ryner ready with cover fire, and a ship full of enemies who would kill him in an instant if they realized who he was.

Whenever footsteps approached, Keith opened a storeroom door for the others, then continued on alone, nodding to passing sentries and soldiers. Then he circled back around, waited until the coast was clear, and rapped on the door to let the others know it was okay to come out.

They repeated this cycle two more times on the way to the computer bay, where Keith took up post at the door.

“All right,” he heard Ryner mutter over the comms. “Let’s see what secrets Commander Vanda has to share.”

* * *

Akira was fucked.

This was not a new revelation, but it did seem particularly relevant now, as he crouched behind a flimsy plywood box that served as his only defense from two soldiers armed with semi-automatics. He hadn’t exactly come here with high hopes of success, but he’d somehow imagined he would be killed by Iverson personally, not a couple of guys he’d once considered friends.

It didn’t matter. He couldn’t back down now any more than he could have stayed away in the first place. They had Karen.

In the chaos of last night’s attack, Akira was surprised he’d managed to get anyone away. But Iverson’s men obviously hadn’t been expecting anyone to fight back. They should’ve learned after the first time they tried to kill Akira.

Akira was pretty sure he’d killed one of the men, and another had been bleeding badly by the time Akira left.

Of course, he’d taken a bullet to the arm and Karen, who’d been shot in the leg in the opening salvo, had been ripped from his arms as he tried to drag her to the waiting SUV. Akira had wanted to go back for her, but Eli, Akani, and Lana were waiting for him in the car. He’d had no choice. Save three, or save none.

He’d done eighty all the way to Naomi’s house—maybe not the safest place now that Naomi had been compromised, but the only place he knew he could find weapons. He’d given each of the Kahales a handgun from Naomi’s collection, suddenly glad for the arsenal he’d found more than a little terrifying when he’d first stumbled upon it.

 _I’ll call Carmen’s phone when I have news,_ he’d said, then sent them off to get the Mendozas to safety.

Lana had wanted to come with him. So had Eli, for that matter, though he couldn’t hold his gun without looking like he was going to be sick. Akani had sided with Akira, though she had forced him to sit still long enough to bandage the wound on his arm and kiss his forehead.

 _Be safe,_ she’d whispered.

Then Akira was driving, flying out of Carlsbad into the desert on the thin hope that Iverson hadn’t simply killed Karen outright.

He’d hoped to come up with a plan on his way out here, but he’d drawn a blank. Alone, injured, with no way to know who at the Garrison he could trust—if he could trust anyone at all—he’d taken a page out of Naomi’s book and driven straight through the fence some way away from the gate, where his arrival wouldn’t be immediately noticed. Then he’d stormed straight up to the guard post outside Iverson’s command bunker.

He wondered if he’d honestly been expecting to be able to talk his way through, or if he was just doing it out of some weird sense of chivalry. Give them a chance to get out of this unharmed.

They’d refused, of course, and Akira had opened fire. The first shot had been a warning. He’d hit Jones in the hand—enough to keep him out of the fight, and only possible because Akira had been less than three feet away. He didn’t want to kill these people, but he _would not_ let them stand between him and Karen. After everything she’d done for him.. She'd been there after Takashi died, after the Garrison blamed him, after Val was taken, after Akira was shot. She’d always been there for him, the one rock the world couldn’t rip away from him.

He wasn’t going to let her down now that she was needed him.

(Or maybe he was going to let her down. He was alone and unprepared on enemy soil, and it was only a matter of time before somebody came running to see what all the shooting was about.)

Footsteps.

Akira spun, bringing up his gun, not yet ready to go down without a fight.

And froze, his mind going quiet as someone ran past him, roaring like a vengeful god.

A beam of light flashed through his periphery with a sound like an arcade game brought to life. Behind Akira, one of the guards screamed. Akira started to turn toward his rescuer, but his eyes caught on one of the other figures coming up behind the first. This one also wore strange armor and carried an odd-looking gun. His face was partially obscured by his helmet, but there was no mistaking Karen Holt's eyes staring back at him from a gaunt, scarred face.

_Matt?_

Even as Akira thought the name, he was spinning, his mind making belated connections. The figure. The man in black armor who had run past. If Matt was here, did that mean--?

Akira stood, forgetting that he’d taken cover for a reason—not that it mattered anymore, because the figure in black armor was standing over the limp forms of three guards, his pistol already holstered, his chest heaving.

It was sleep deprivation, Akira decided. It was the gunshot. The pain. Maybe the Garrison had laced their bullets with slow-acting hallucinogens, because Akira could not be seeing what he was seeing. His foot scraped the ground as he staggered forward, clutching the bullet wound in his arm that he thought should have been bothering him. He couldn't seem to feel anything but the flutter of his heart.

“Takashi?”

The man in black turned, and the world lurched. (Or maybe it was just Akira, because the ground was rushing up to meet him, and he couldn’t seem to make his body remember how to compensate--)

Strong hands caught him by the elbow before he hit the ground, and then he was looking up into his brother’s face—older, so much older than what Akira remembered—as tears blurred his vision. He blinked, trying to take it all in. The lines around Takashi’s eyes, the scar across his face. A streak of vivid white hair falling across his forehead.

_What did they do to you?_

Akira opened his mouth, then saw the Shiro that existed below the scarred, weary exterior. He carried tension in his shoulders, more tension than Akira could attribute to the brief skirmish, especially now that other armored figures were closing in a protective circle around them. And his eyes—Takashi had always been good at hiding his fear, but it showed now, as always, in the pinch of his brow. His white lips, pressed together as though to hold a torrent in, belied his threadbare composure.

 _Don’t ask me how I am,_ his face said. _I can’t afford to break down now._

So Akira straightened, breathing deeply to settle the raging emotions inside him. He ran the back of his hand across his eyes and laughed in pure, unfiltered incredulity. He had to try twice to speak before he said, feebly, “Hollywood lied to me.”

Takashi frowned, pouting a little as he pulled off his helmet. The pout eased some of the brittleness from his expression, as the head full of familar dark hair softened the white at his hairline. “Hollywood… what?”

“They made me believe space was all seventies rejects and discotheque space ships and weird-ass tin foil space suits.” Akira reached up and tugged once, firmly, on the lock of white hair plastered to Takashi’s forehead. “If I’d known astronauts were all secretly scene kids, I might have fought your for that fighter pilot spot.”

Two years ago, Takashi would have heard at once the rest of what Akira was saying. _I wish I could have stopped what happened to you. I wish I_ knew  _what happened to you, but_ _I won't press until you're ready._

Takashi stared back at him for a long moment, blinking in utter bafflement, and Akira felt the months of separation condensing between them, an ocean that ran deeper than Akira ever would have imagined. This was his brother, his twin, but Takashi had seen things Akira could not understand. Akira kept up his grin, clinging to the fact that Takashi was here and letting the rest slide away.

A moment later, Takashi's eyes filled with tears. He laughed, the sound filled with just as much tangled up joy and grief as Akira felt, and lifted Akira off his feet in a bone-crushing hug.

“God I missed you, Akira.”

Akira smiled, a stray tear escaping him as he squeezed his eyes shut and hugged Takashi back, his nails digging into the seams of Takashi's armor. “I missed you, too, you jerk,” he whispered, his voice cracking. It wasn’t nearly enough to express the whirlwind of shock and relief and desperate, poignant elation that threatened to rip him apart a the seams, but it was all he could offer right now. “I missed you, too.”

* * *

“I’ve got something,” Ryner said.

Nyma turned from her position at the door, every nerve on alert. “Rolo?”

Ryner hummed. “I can’t say for sure. All I know is that two cells are in use on deck two, near the engines. I haven’t found the prisoner data yet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Keith said, his voice low and grainy over the comms. He still stood guard outside the door, though he’d been following Ryner’s progress for the last ten minutes. “We’re getting them out either way.” Twice so far, he’d had to tell their prepared story about maintenance on the computer systems to keep passing Galra from getting suspicious, but no one had lingered long enough to make the paladins worry.

(Paladins. Nyma still felt a flash of unease every time she thought of herself that way. Val, she understood. Lance, she understood. But _her_?)

“Sending the route to your armor now,” Ryner said, and the little computation unit built into Nyma’s armor beeped softly as it received the file. Nyma called up the map just to be sure everything was working, then nodded to Ryner.

“You ready for this?” she asked Keith.

He tapped twice on the door, signaling that she was clear to come out, and caught her gaze as she joined him.

They set off without a word, Keith a few steps ahead of Nyma, clicking his fingers when he spotted other Galra coming their way. The ship was quiet, though—as quiet as it had been last time, and Nyma was even more convinced that this Vanda lady was short on troops.

They reached the cell block quickly, and it was there that Nyma finally gave up on stealth. As Keith closed the distance to the first guard, swinging his rifle like a club, Nyma lifted her own weapon and took the other guard between the eyes.

She raised an eyebrow in Keith’s direction. “Have you been taking shooting lessons from Val or something?”

Keith frowned, but Nyma only shook her head. A heavy steel door stood between her and the prisoners—between her and the one chance she had for seeing Rolo alive again. If he wasn’t in here, even if he hadn’t been shot on sight, he’d be dead long before Nyma tracked him down.

“You okay?” Keith asked, and Nyma would have snapped at him if his claw hadn’t been tracing the hilt of his sword, if his eyes hadn’t been pulled tight with the same worry wrapping around Nyma’s lungs.

It helped, somehow. Knowing someone else cared.

She might have thanked him, if she’d been able to put into words what it was she was grateful for. His presence? His friendship? His existence, which had proved to Rolo that maybe there was hope for someone like him, after all?

But Nyma couldn’t condense her emotions into a few short words. Instead, she gestured to the door, and raised her rifle as Keith palmed the controls.

The door slid open to reveal two more guards, who shouted in alarm and hastened to ready their weapons.

Nyma’s mouth quirked upward. “Maybe you shouldn’t soundproof your doors, assholes.” She fired two quick shots, both of which found their mark. The guards dropped, and Nyma stepped over them. Keith shot her something dangerously close to a pout.

“You could have left some for me,” he said.

Nyma smiled, but it was a distracted smile. The control panels outside two of the cells glowed red, indicating which were in use. Nyma was already peering through the slit in one of the doors by the time Keith came over to open them.

Two humans huddled inside, staring up at their rescuers with wide eyes. Nyma’s throat was too thick to form reassurances, so she just turned impatiently to the next door as Keith told the prisoners, in low tones, that they were friends. That they were here to help.

He opened the other door, and three more humans stared up at them. One roared in fury and charged Keith, swinging with a closed fist.

Nyma’s grief washed over her, through her, and left her cold. She stepped forward as the human advanced, grabbed his arm, and swung him around.

“All right, listen up,” she said, staring at the four other frightened faces staring at her in stark terror. “I’m sure you’re still trying to wrap your heads around the fact that aliens exist, or whatever, but I’m just gonna skip to the part where we rescue you. Okay? Okay.”

Keith shook his head, his eyes amused as he gently loosened Nyma’s grip on the man who’d charged him. “We’ll explain everything later,” he said. “Right now we need to move.”

The man Nyma had pinned against the wall rubbed his wrist, watching Keith and Nyma suspiciously. The other humans emerged, wary, and glanced both ways. Seeing the dead guards, one of them gasped, his face turning a curious shade of gray.

Nyma breathed out, her anger fizzling. “It’s going to be okay,” she said, trying to pretend she was talking to Val. Val wouldn’t have let herself get caught up in the fact that Rolo wasn’t here. Val would have helped these people.

Rolo, she knew, would have at least tried to soothe their fears.

These humans didn’t seem much in the soothing mood, though they did at least start walking now that it was clear neither she nor Keith were planning on killing them. They still eyed Keith with distrust—no doubt recognizing the guard uniform for what it was. His posture remained stiff as they hurried back the way they had come, and he left the prisoners mostly in Nyma’s not-so-capable hands, hailing Shay and Ryner on the comms.

“We’re nearly done,” Shay assured him. “We will meet you at the extraction point.”

“Good,” Keith said, hissing a curse as he spotted someone ahead. Nyma herded the prisoners into a closet, shushing them as one began to cry into another’s shoulder. Nyma’s heart clenched, remembering all too keenly how fragile Val had been in the day or two after her rescue. Nyma wanted to be sympathetic to these people; she _should_ feel sympathy. But all she felt was impatience and a roaring static in her ears.

Keith tapped twice on the door, and Nyma wasted no time getting the group moving again. She didn’t trust herself to speak until the docking bay came into sight, Shay waiting for them at the mouth of the Green Lion.

“Hey, Coran,” Nyma said, backing toward the lion as the last prisoner scrambled up the ramp. She glanced once around the room, nodded to Keith, then followed the others to the cockpit. “How’s it going on the ground?”

There was silence for a few moments, and when Coran finally spoke, it was with no small amount of strain. “There… ah… seems to have been a bit of a scuffle. I’ll know more in a few ticks.”

* * *

Shiro couldn’t hold onto Akira forever, however much he wanted to. There was still a job to do, still enemies all around them to consider, and Shiro had to be strong for his team.

But, _god_ , it would have been so easy to forget all that.

Akira seemed as reluctant to pull back as Shiro, his hand lingering on Shiro’s arm—the prosthetic arm, which was indistinguishable from the other with his armor on. Shiro was glad for the armor, and for the fact that Akira didn’t have to know the whole truth yet, but it weighed on him. He knew he couldn’t keep it secret forever.

“I hope you know I’m going to grill you about all this later,” Akira muttered, finally letting go of Shiro to punch him lightly in the shoulder. “But we’re kinda short on time here, so I’m just going to ask one thing: did Iverson know you were alive?”

“Yes,” Matt said, before Shiro could figure out how to answer. Akira turned to him, a rapid-fire series of expressions flickering across his face. Joy, worry, anger. “I don’t know for sure that he orchestrated it all, but he was definitely in contact with the people who took us.”

Akira’s mouth turned downward. “The people who took you?”

“Well. Aliens,” Pidge said, scratching their neck. “Technically speaking.”

“Aliens.” Akira pressed a thumb to the inner corner of his eye, the way he often did when he had a headache. “You’re joking.”

Pidge grinned, elbowing Allura. “You wanna demonstrate for him?”

“Do you think that’s necessary?” Allura asked, glancing at Shiro as though expecting him to tell her what to do. Shiro did his best to convey _hell if I know_ with a shrug. Allura frowned, but rather than follow Pidge’s chanted plea to _shapeshift, shapeshift, shapeshift_ , she opted to simply remove her helmet.

Shiro watched as Akira took in Allura’s white hair, eyes narrowing like he was trying to decide if it was bleached. He watched Akira’s eyes skim over her _glaes_ , then flicker back as though realizing the color was too bright, too close to a bioluminescent glow, to be a tattoo. He saw the moment Akira registered Allura’s ears, and the way he looked very much like he wanted to laugh but couldn’t quite bring himself to.

“Oh my god,” he said, sweeping a hand back over his hair. “Eli and Namoi are never going to let me live this down.”

Hunk perked up at that, taking half a step forward before he faltered. “Eli. You mean…?”

Akira glanced at him—at all of them. His eyes widened when he spotted Val, who wiggled her fingers at him and shrugged, and Shiro could _feel_ Akira fighting the urge to demand the full story here and now. He smiled weakly at Pidge, who had somehow ended up within arm’s reach and grinned when Akira reached out and rubbed a hand over the crown of their helmet. There was a story there, too, Shiro thought.

It would wait.

“Yeah.” Akira took a deep breath and turned back to Hunk. “Eli Kahale. Your uncle, I’m guessing? Naomi managed to convince him you three had been abducted by aliens. I told him he was crazy and...” He gestured helplessly, shaking his head. “Look where that’s landed me. Goddamnit, Takashi. You’re not allowed to break reality anymore. I don’t think my head can take it.”

Shiro laughed, clapping him on the shoulder. “I’ll try to keep that in mind.”

Val raised a hand, though she hardly waited for Shiro and Akira to look at her before she said, “I’m not going to ask who Naomi is right now, because I get we’re all kinda in a hurry, though I _would_ like it noted that I’m a little bit suspicious of someone who showed up out of nowhere sometime in the last—what, two months?—and somehow knew aliens were involved.”

“Noted,” said Shiro dryly, and Val flicked a sloppy salute his direction.

“What I _am_ gonna ask is what _you’re_ doing here, and why you were shooting at those guards.” She gestured to the crumpled forms of the guards Shiro had knocked out. He _thought_ he’d only knocked them out, anyway. He hadn’t been trying to kill them, but he hadn’t exactly been trying _not_ to kill them, either. The sight of Akira bleeding as somebody shot at him had knocked most other considerations from Shiro’s head. Some things never changed, he supposed. Akira was always the one picking fights he couldn’t win, and Shiro always had to come charging in to save him.

Akira stiffened suddenly, whipping around toward the door the other soldiers had been guarding. “Shit,” he whispered. “We need to go.”

“Go?” Lance asked. “Go where?”

Akira was already at the door, punching in a code. He twisted the handle, then swore. “Of course they changed the damn code, Akira, don’t be stupid.” He mussed up his hair, then glanced back toward Shiro. “Don’t suppose you found some sort of magic door-disintegration beam out there in space?”

Pidge summoned their bayard and quietly shoved Akira aside. “Leave this to me,” they said, setting the glowing tip of their blade against the lock. “What’s in here, anyway?”

Akira was silent for long enough that Pidge lifted their bayard away from the door and frowned at him. He closed his eyes, pain washing over him. “Iverson sent people to your house last night,” he said, raising his voice as both Pidge and Matt sucked in startled breaths. “The Kahales were staying there, too. Naomi warned me in time to get over there, but I only managed to get the Kahales out. I don’t even know if Karen’s here—I can’t get ahold of Naomi. She’s the one who keeps us informed about Iverson’s movements. But--”

Pidge didn’t seem to have listened past their mother’s name. Even as Matt’s hand came down on Shiro’s arm in a steel grip, Pidge spun, slashing through the deadbolt, and kicked the door open.

“Come on!” they roared, charging in. Hunk and Allura weren’t far behind, and Lance looked torn between giving chase and staying close to Val.

Shiro squeezed Akira’s arm, then pulled Matt into a sprint, the two of them charging down the stairs. Pidge had met resistance at the bottom, though the dozen or so soldiers who had been waiting with weapons drawn hardly fazed them. They spun through the ranks, lashing out with their bayard. Lightning flashed, filling the enclosed space with the scent of ozone and singed hair. Allura danced just outside Pidge’s reach, slamming her staff into the chests and head of soldiers taking aim at Pidge. Hunk fired a burst of lasers at the ceiling, frightening a soldier who had been trying to sneak up on Allura from behind.

By the time Shiro and Matt arrived, the fight was over, and Pidge was already off and running again. “Mom!” they cried, skidding around a corner.

“Pidge!” Akira called. “Wait—Pidge!”

It was no use. Pidge wasn’t going to stop for anything—not that Shiro could blame them for that, after what the sight of Akira in danger had done to him. All he could do was try to keep up, and be ready to step in if ( _when_ ) Pidge ran into an ambush.

The problem was they were so much _faster_ than the rest of them. Even more so when they were running on this kind of adrenaline. Matt could almost keep pace—almost, except for the grimace of pain he tried not to show each time he landed on his bad knee. Pidge was a full ten paces ahead of the rest of them when they rounded a corner and let out a shout of surprise.

* * *

“Well go fucking _stop them!_ ” Iverson roared. His voice sounded oddly hollow through the door. Distant in a way that didn’t line up with the fact that Karen knew he was only a few feet away.

Maybe that was the bullet in her thigh making her head fuzzy. The bullet, and the waves of pain that crested every time she tried to move. Somebody had tied a length of gauze over the wound and over her pajama pants, but by now both gauze and pants were saturated with sticky, half-dried blood. The bleeding had slowed. She thought it had slowed. But whenever she gathered herself to stand, half-formed plans of escape stewing in her head, she felt fresh, warm blood weeping down her leg, and a wave of vertigo swept over her.

She didn’t know how much of that was blood loss, how much was pain, and how much was the stark, all-consuming terror that had her in its grip. She didn’t know how long she’d been here, though she surmised she was at the Garrison, if only because Iverson was here and livid. She’d blacked out on the drive over and woken up here, in a room empty of furniture except a bare desk along one wall and the cot she’d been lying on, now bloodied from her wound. There was no clock in here, and no windows. It could still be the middle of the night, or it could be the middle of the day. She might have been here for weeks, for all she knew.

Why hadn’t they killed her yet?

The pain slammed against her again, leaving her breathless and unable to focus on Iverson’s words as he started shouting again. There seemed to be a constant stream of soldiers coming to report and receive orders, and Iverson didn’t sound pleased with any of them. Karen hadn’t been able to piece together what was happening, but she gathered that Iverson’s men had screwed themselves over somehow.

She wondered if this was Akira’s doing, then smiled to herself. She wouldn’t put a futile rescue attempt past him, but she knew one man, however pissed off, couldn’t put the entire Garrison in this state of panic.

Still, it was a nice thought.

One thing had kept her (somewhat) calm through all this: she was alive. Iverson had targeted her specifically, and she was still alive. Maybe not for long, and he was certainly going to make her disappear one way or another, but the fact she was alive gave her hope.

After all, if he would keep her alive, then surely he wouldn’t have slaughtered Pidge and their friends.

_Maybe he’ll send me to where they are. That might even make this bullet worth it._

Iverson was talking again, his voice too low for Karen to make out words, but someone responded with a quick, _yessir!_ Then footsteps, and the door of Karen’s room swung open. She tensed, casting about her for a weapon, an escape route, _anything_. She may have been a captive, but she refused to be helpless.

“Bring her to the shuttle once she's sedated,” Iverson said, his voice already fading.

He was leaving, Karen realized. Iverson was leaving, and she heard no other voices beyond her door. If she could get past the soldier walking in on her, then--

Naomi stepped fully into the room, closing the door behind her. She pressed a finger to her lips, listened at the door for a moment, then crossed to Karen’s side.

“Are you okay?” Naomi hissed, setting aside a syringe and kneeling beside Karen’s cot. Her eyes fell on the bloodied bandage and she hissed. “Okay, stupid question. Lie down. I’m going to take a look at this.”

Karen opened her mouth to argue, but Naomi just pushed her backward with more force than Karen could fight. Her head swam as she lay down, and she winced as Naomi peeled the bandage away from her wound.

“Akira--” Karen cut off with a gasp, trying to pull her leg away from Naomi’s prying fingers. “Akira said you were attacked. How are you here?”

Naomi breathed deeply and let it out slowly. “Practice,” she said. “Lots and lots of practice. Hold still.”

“That doesn’t answer any—augh!” A spike of pain shot down Karen femur, silencing her for a long while. She closed her eyes, grinding the heel of her hand against her eyelid as she tried to make herself breathe. Naomi—Naomi must have gotten away last night (last night? God, it was so hard to think straight.) She’d lost her phone, but Iverson hadn’t realized it was her. “When did you make it into Iverson’s inner circle?”

Naomi’s hands stilled, giving Karen a momentary reprieve from the pain. “Karen.” For a moment, it sounded like Naomi was going to say more, but then she huffed and pressed hard against Karen’s bullet wound. The pain crested once more, icy cold shuddering through Karen’s entire body for an endless moment before it faded—vanished. She was left shuddering, sweating like she’d just run a marathon, but the fire in her leg had faded to nothing worse than an ache deep in her muscles.

“Wh-what?” Karen licked her lips, trying to sit up, but Naomi pushed her down as she began winding fresh gauze around Karen’s leg. “What was that?”

“Pain patch,” Naomi said. “Stole it from the infirmary on my way down here. Figured you might need something.” She tied off the gauze, then helped Karen sit up. She felt dizzy for an instant, but it passed quickly, and she stared down at her leg, thoughts swimming.

“That’s one hell of a pain patch.”

“Yeah,” Naomi said. She hesitated, then took Karen by the shoulders. “I need you to trust me, Karen. Can you do that? I swear I’ll answer any questions you have once we’re out of here, but for right now I need you to do exactly as I say. No arguments.”

She looked ashen, her dark hair frazzled. Her Garrison uniform hung loose on her frame, as though she’d lost weight recently, and there were dusty patches on the knees.

Karen nodded, and Naomi breathed a sigh of relief. “All right. Keep your head down, and keep quiet. Iverson’s got shit to deal with right now, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to run into problems.”

“Shit to deal with?” Karen echoed.

Naomi smiled. “He was supposed to get all of you last night, but it sounds like everyone else got away, and that pissed off someone with a _lot_ more power than Commander Iverson. Heads are gonna roll soon, and Iverson’s desperately trying to make sure his isn’t one.”

More questions burned in Karen’s mind—who was more powerful than Iverson? And what sort of damage control could he do with Akira and the Kahales still free? But Naomi pressed a finger to her lips, cracked the door open, then gestured for Karen to follow. She stood, fully expecting her injured leg to give out.

But it held her weight, and she walked on unsteady feet to the door and out into the abandoned room beyond. They made it to the dark, quiet corridor, and then the sound of bullets filled the air. Bullets, and something sharper, something like the whine of electronics, like hot metal plunging into cold water. Shouting voices, just a bit too distant to pick out from the furor.

Naomi froze, Karen running into her from behind.

“What?” Karen hissed. “What’s wrong?”

Naomi’s breath had gone shallow, her eyes fixed on the corner ahead of them.

A figure in what looked like white and green Kevlar armor came charging around the corner carrying a blade edged with an acid green glow. They slowed to a stop, a ragged cry escaping them—a cry that pierced straight to Karen’s heart and twisted, bringing tears to her eyes.

“Pidge…?” she whispered.

The armored figure—too short to be a soldier, with familiar amber eyes and a dusting of freckles across cheeks flush with exertion—careened forward. The blade in their hand vanished, and they flung their arms around Karen’s waist, sending her staggering backwards, too stunned to do anything more than stare down at the top of the helmet as Pidge began to sob into her chest.

* * *

Shiro found new reserves of speed at Pidge’s cry, sprinting flat out around the corner, pistol in one hand, knife in the other, ready to take out Zarkon himself if that was who Pidge had found--

He stopped dead, Matt catching his arm to keep from face-planting as he skidded to a stop. Karen Holt stood ahead of them, Pidge clinging to her. She looked dazed, staring down at Pidge as though she couldn’t decide if what she was seeing was real. Her hair was in disarray, the satin pajamas she wore torn and rumpled. There was a bandage tied around her right thigh, the fabric beneath stained crimson. Her lip was swollen and crusted with dried blood, her eyes wide as she stared down at the quivering figure with their arms wrapped tight around her waist.

“Is…?” Karen’s voice broke, and she placed one shaking hand on Pidge’s shoulder. “Are you…?”

“Mom,” Matt whispered. The word was so soft Shiro was surprised Karen heard it, but her head snapped up, her eyes fixing on Matt and almost instantly filling up with tears. She looked back down at Pidge, her lips moving soundlessly in what might have been their name. Pidge’s shoulders hitched higher.

A woman in a dusty, rumpled Garrison uniform shifted nervously just behind Karen, glancing from the intertwined Holts to Matt, still frozen at Shiro’s side, to the empty hallway behind them. Her short chestnut hair swayed as her head swiveled, her eyes darting nervously.

A wordless keen hissed between her teeth as Lance, Val, Hunk, Allura, and Akira appeared. “Okay, not to be a _total_ bastard here, but can we put this reunion on hold for, like, ninety seconds? _Please_?”

Allura frowned, raising her staff in preparation for a fight. “Why?” she demanded. “What’s wrong? Who are you?”

The woman stared at Allura for a long moment, eyes wide, mouth working silently.

Behind Shiro, Akira chuckled. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s about how I felt, too. Surprise! Aliens are totally real, after all.”

“You know her?” Shiro asked in a low voice.

Akira nodded. “This is Naomi. I’m guessing they found out you were working for us. How’d you get out?”

Naomi finally tore her gaze off Allura and laughed, a thin, reedy sound. “Oh, you’d be surprised. I can be awfully slippery when I want to be.”

“No,” Akira deadpanned. “I never would have guessed.”

The smile that flashed across her face was almost genuine, though it vanished in an instant as something large and angry roared from somewhere just out of sight. Karen whirled, shoving Pidge behind her.

“Mom--?” Pidge began.

Karen shushed them. “It’s okay,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “It’s going to be okay.”

Two Galra—burlier than any Shiro had ever seen and at least eight feet tall—charged out into the hallway and turned their gazes on Karen and Naomi. Shiro brought his pistol up and fired six shots at the Galra in the lead. All six lasers struck him in the chest, but his armor just rippled with faint blue light, then smoothed over, unmarked by Shiro’s assault.

 _Well,_ Shiro thought, shifting to block Akira from the retaliation he knew was coming. _I guess that answers the question of whether Vanda’s started moving troops planet-side._

The hallway was too narrow to spread out and flank the Galra, and it was soon filled with enough laserfire from Hunk and Lance that Allura didn’t dare close the distance to the Galra. Pidge thrashed against Karen’s vicelike grip on their arm, straining toward the fight, but Karen just kept dragging them back, ignoring their shouts to let go. Matt and Hunk stood on either side of Shiro, Lance on Hunk’s far side. Akira waited at Shiro’s shoulder, not firing but holding his gun at the ready.

“What the hell _are_ those things?”

“Monsters,” said Karen.

Shiro grimaced. “They’re called Galra, and they’re trying to take over the—well, the entire universe, but right now the Earth specifically.”

Akira’s gaze burned into the back of Shiro’s head. Karen gaped openly at him, and then down at Pidge. Naomi might as well not have heard him; she was backing slowly away from the Galra, her right hand flexing like she expected to be holding a gun and didn’t quite know what to do without one.

Shiro didn’t have any more time to waste on explanations. The Galra were still approaching, hardly slowed by the hail of laserfire. Their armor must have been made of tougher stuff than ordinary Galra armor, for it absorbed the paladins’ shots effortlessly.

“The eyes,” Lance whispered, just loud enough for Shiro to hear. “It’s the only part of them that’s not covered.”

Shiro shifted his aim, but he’d been too long out of practice with his marksmanship, and he hadn’t had a chance to practice with his new prosthetic. His shots went wide, striking the walls to either side of the Galra and glancing off their shoulders. Matt’s aim was a little better, but only a little—he, too, had focused too heavily on close-range combat lately—and Hunk’s bayard fired with too wide a spread for proper aiming.

Lance, though.

Lance’s first shot left a blackened scorch mark just above the first Galra’s eyeslit. The second slid cleanly through the gap. The Galra’s head jerked back, and he staggered, then caught his balance and continued forward at the same steady pace. Lance swore, his next shot burning a furrow in the ceiling, and Shiro fired more four times, trying to intimidate the Galra, hoping to get lucky.

Roaring, Lance steadied his stance and fired three more times. Two of the lasers found their target. The Galra jerked backwards again with each hit, wavered, then finally collapsed.

The second Galra froze for just an instant, staring at his fallen companion, then let out a monstrous roar.

“Uh… Shiro?” Hunk said. “I don’t think these are ordinary Galra.”

The second Galra broke into a sprint, barreling down the corridor toward them. There was something inherently _wrong_ about his gait, something unnatural, something--

_An alien creature, almost unrecognizable beneath the cybernetic enhancements, but something Shiro now knew to be a Balmeran wallowing underneath. An inhuman roar, an insatiable bloodlust. Wyn, cowering behind the obstacles that littered the Arena._

_A desperate fight. Unbearable pain in his arm._

Shiro swore, throwing both arms up as he stepped forward to meet the creature before it could crush Lance beneath its massive hand.

The force of the blow was more than Shiro had been expecting, and the breath was driven from his lungs as he skidded backward across the floor. He heard Akira screaming his name, but the world was spinning, and something in his chest seemed to have shifted out of place. He staggered to his feet, knife still gripped in one hand. He didn’t know where the pistol had ended up.

Didn’t matter now. Pidge had finally managed to break away from Karen and wrap the tether of their bayard around the Galra beast. Hunk and Lance were still firing at the thing’s eyes. It was harder now with it thrashing like that, its head never staying still long enough to aim. Akira was firing now, too, the ring of his gunshots painfully loud in the enclosed space. Matt had switched to his sword, though he seemed unsure of how to approach the fight.

Shiro found his balance and charged back in, knife held low. He tried to imagine it as an extension of his arm, tried to get the habits he’d fallen into with Haggar’s prosthetic to transfer to his new weapon, but he felt off-kilter and uncertain, his body expecting something other than what he had to offer.

Somebody screamed just as Shiro neared the line of paladins—someone behind Shiro. He spun, and found Iverson standing behind Karen Holt, a gun pressed to her head.

“Mom!” Pidge screamed. They cried out, and Karen lunged forward as the Galra creature slammed Pidge against the wall. They dropped to the ground, dazed.

“I’ll shoot,” Iverson warned, pulling Karen against him. “Don’t think I won’t.”

Shiro’s neck crawled as the Galra creature behind him roared, but he forced himself to trust the others as Lance hollered at Hunk to hold. Shiro reached out, seizing Matt’s wrist as Matt lunged forward.

“ _Wait,_ ” Shiro hissed to him. Matt thrashed once, then fell still, his body quivering with a palpable loathing as he glared at Iverson. Shiro squeezed his wrist. _Wait,_ he urged silently. _Don’t do anything reckless._ “You don’t have to do this, Iverson,” Shiro growled. It took all his self-control to stay civil, when all he wanted to do was tear into this man for sending him out to Kerberos to die. For at the very least being complicit in Project Balmera, even if he hadn’t had a direct hand in Matt’s living hell.

 _Not yet._ He wouldn’t risk Karen to satisfy his own fury. Iverson had already done enough damage to the Holt family.

“Do you even know who it is you’ve allied yourself with?” Shiro asked, his voice a deadly purr. He could feel Allura somewhere nearby, hovering just out of sight. “Do you even know who the Galra are? What they do?”

Iverson’s smile didn’t touch his eyes. “I’ve been brought up to speed, yes. Emperor Zarkon. The paladins of Voltron. This war you’ve dragged us into.”

“ _I’ve_ dragged us into?” Shiro asked. He heard Pidge cry out in pain but refused to turn. Val was shouting their name, Hunk was roaring wordlessly, the Galra creature howled in fury.

Iverson still held Karen at gunpoint. “You can’t honestly think you can win a war that’s been going on for ten thousand years with a handful of _children._ ”

Karen’s face contorted in rage. “At least they don’t sacrifice children to save their own asses,” she hissed. For an instant, Iverson’s composure wavered. For just an instant, his attention wasn’t on Shiro, but on Karen, who snarled and drove her elbow back into Iverson’s solar plexus with a viciousness and accuracy that left Iverson wheezing.

Shiro and Matt sprang forward at the same instant, Matt grabbing his mother and swinging her behind him, Shiro forcing Iverson’s gun toward the sky. Allura appeared behind Iverson, swinging for his head, but he twisted at the last second, and the staff cracked across his shoulders instead. He snarled, swiping for Shiro’s eyes with his fingernails, and Shiro lost his hold on the gun.

It fired once, and Shiro felt a punch in his side, followed by a sudden chill.

“ _Takashi!_ ” Akira screamed. He cried out as the Galra beast swung at him, knocking him off his feet. Akira’s gun spun away from him, but he ignored it, scrambling toward Shiro, his face pale and drawn, his eyes wide with fear.

“I’m fine,” Shiro said, clutching his side. There was blood, hot and slick, but not as much as he would have expected. His armor must have absorbed most of the impact, though it hadn’t been able to stop the slug entirely. Funny, he would have thought a laser would be more dangerous than an ordinary bullet.

Allura howled in rage and pain, snapping Shiro’s attention back to Iverson. Allura was down on one knee before him, her helmet lying discarded beside her, its faceplate cracked. Iverson had his left hand knotted in her hair, and she squirmed in an attempt to keep out of the sights of his gun, her face twisted up in pain.

“You’re one of _them_ , aren’t you?” Iverson snarled. “An Altean?’

“And what if I am?”

Iverson’s grin widened. “Leverage,” he said, twisting her hair until she gasped in pain and fell still, the barrel of his gun pressed against the side of her head. “Maybe I can win my people’s freedom if I deliver your corpse to Lord Zarkon.”

“ _Get your quiznaking hands off her!_ ”

A blur of dusty gray and red-brown hair flashed passed Shiro, barreling into Iverson. Naomi—no longer in shock, her face contorted in bald fury. She shoved Allura aside, grabbing for the gun.

Iverson was faster.

There was a flash of light, and Naomi’s head snapped back. Shiro saw it only from the corner of his eye, his attention focused on Allura, who had caught herself as she fell and was already scrambling to her feet. But the image, the horrible, vivid red seeping across Naomi’s scalp--

Naomi took a single step back, steadied herself, and laughed. “God _fucking_ ancients,” she snarled, lifting her head. A patch of calloused, silvery-blue skin was splattered across her face like paint. Even as she straightened, the skin smoothed out, the color receding to the usual medium brown—brown marked by vivid violet _glaes_ beneath her eyes. “That _hurt_.”

Shiro blinked, trying to resolve the image of the Altean before him—pointed ears, golden irises, and stunning crimson hair. Allura sagged against the wall, her lips parted in shock as she stared at Naomi, who was bleeding from a small cut just above her left eye. Naomi smiled at her, the expression strained.

“Are you okay?”

Allura’s breathing hitched. “ _Meri_?” she whispered. Shiro’s heart leaped into his throat, borrowed memories pressing at his mind. A silver laugh, a warm hand. A final goodbye Shiro had always tried not see when he was inside Allura’s head. “How?”

Naomi— _Meri—_ lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Tell you later?” she said, and before Allura could answer, Meri turned, knocking away the gun Iverson was bringing to bear on her. “Oh, fuck off, Mitch.”

Allura, to her credit, got over her shock quickly. She was up and ready for battle before Shiro pushed through the pain of his wound. Meri socked Iverson across the jaw, ejected the magazine from his gun, and flicked a salute at Shiro and Allura.

“He’s all yours,” Meri said. In an eyeblink, she’d changed, a Galra now standing in her place, her larger frame straining the seams of her uniform. She turned and sprinted toward the Galra creature as Allura stalked forward to restrain Iverson, who snarled and threw himself to the side, his hand outstretched for--Shiro swore as he spotted his gun, lying abandoned near the wall. Iverson's fingertips brushed the grip, and Shiro fell atop him, grabbing his arm and twisting.

Iverson howled in pain, bucking and writhing. His elbow caught Shiro in the jaw, stunning him, and Iverson flipped over. His fist found Shiro’s bullet wound, igniting a fresh flare of agony; Shiro lost his grip on Iverson, who lunged forward and closed his hand around the gun. He spun, raised the pistol toward Shiro.

A shot rang out. Iverson jerked, Shiro’s gun falling from spasming hands. He stared down at the circle of red blossoming on his chest, confusion painted across his brow.

Shiro turned, searching for the source of the shot, and found Val standing there, tears streaming down her face, her lips pulled back in a snarl. "That's for Project Balmera," she hissed. She held Akira’s gun in steady hands, but the steel in her spine fractured as she realized how many people were staring at her. She staggered back, her eyes flickering to the gun in her hand, a sliver of fear creeping in. "I had to," she whispered, looking around as though expecting an accusation. "He was going to--He was--"

Karen caught her from behind, easing the gun from Val's shaking hands. "Don't apologize," Karen whispered. "You did what you had to. You stopped him from hurting anyone else."

Val sagged against her, burying her face as Iverson's breath turned ragged. Karen’s merciless gaze remained steady on Iverson as he pawed at his chest, his eyes roving around the hallway in search of aid. Shiro started forward, Akira supporting him, and grabbed his gun before Iverson thought to go for it again.

Iverson laughed, the sound tinged with hatred and desperation. “I tried,” he gasped. “I tried to save you sad fucks.”

Shiro’s head spun, and he sagged against Akira. “No,” he said. “You just wanted to save yourself.”

Iverson slumped against the wall just as the Galra creature’s roar shook the hallway.

Meri landed in a crouch near Shiro, skidding backwards, her Galra form fading in a flash, replaced just as quickly with a species Shiro only vaguely recognized as a Piraxan—short striped fur, feathered ears, a long tail. This form was a few inches shorter than Meri’s usual body, but noticeably quicker. She darted forward, dodging claws and lasers alike, then slid on her shins beneath the creature’s legs, lashing her tail around its ankle. The tail pulled taut, and Meri kicked up, spinning as she did and latching onto the creature’s back.

“Lance!” she roared, climbing toward its shoulders. “Bayard!”

Lance’s head shot up, his brows drawing together in a frown. “How do _you_ know my name?”

“ _Now,_ Lance!”

Lance’s bayard reverted to its inactive form, and he hesitated only a second before winding back and throwing it at the creature’s head. Meri caught it out of the air, and the bayard took the form of a short spear, its head glowing an icy white. Meri threw one leg over the creature’s shoulder, her tail lashing behind her as she strained for balance, and drove her spear directly into the creature’s eye.

It howled, and Meri reverted to her Altean form as she rode the creature to the ground. It landed with a thud that shook dust free from the ceiling to rain down on the scene of carnage below.

There was a moment of utter silence, Val still gasping for air as Karen whispered reassurances, the air buzzing with the sudden absence of laserfire. Meri stood, tucking a stray lock of red hair behind her ear, and flashed a lopsided smile.

“Hey, Allura. Welcome to Earth!” She spread her arms wide as though to encompass everything: the two fallen cybernetic creatures; Iverson’s crumpled form; the bullet hole in Shiro’s side; Hunk, who knelt by a dazed Pidge near one wall; Karen and Val, who clung to each other; and Akira, who looked like he couldn’t decide whether to laugh at Meri or punch her and so had settled for running one hand back and forth across his mouth.

Allura stared at Meri for the space of two breaths. Then her face scrunched up with impending tears, and she flung herself at Meri with so much force they both crashed to the ground, Meri’s laugh cutting off in a wheeze.

“You died,” Allura said. “You _died._ Why aren’t you dead?”

Meri’s hand came up, cupping the back of Allura’s head as Allura cried into her chest. “Jeez, princess. You really know how to make a girl feel loved.”

Allura planted her hands on Meri’s shoulders and shoved, lifting herself up just far enough to glare at Meri. Shiro would have expected the tears to soften Allura’s glare, but she still looked ready to tear through solid steel with her bare hands. “I mourned you, Meri. I listened to your message, and I _believed it_ when you said you were dead.”

“To be fair, I didn’t _know_ I’d have a chance to steal a cryopod from the Senate before I came here.” Meri raised her eyebrows, trying to look innocent. “Points for improvisation?”

A laugh bubbled out of Allura, and she climbed to her feet, pulling Meri up with her. When they were both standing, Allura hugged her again. “I _missed_ you.”

“I told you I’d wait for you, didn't I? As long as it took.”

Allura's face softened, new tears falling every time she blinked. "I never should have doubted you."

Lance, who had gone to Val as soon as the battle was over, taking over for Karen and rubbing Val's back, glanced past his cousin’s shoulder to the two Alteans. “Okay, not to ruin the moment or anything,” he said. “But how the hell do you know my name?”

Meri stepped away from Allura, running her eyes the length of Lance’s body. Her lips quirked into a smile, and rather than answer, she merely shifted back into human form—but not the form she’d worn before. Her face was rounder now, her hair darker and more curled.

Lance stiffened. “Tía Lena?” Val's head lifted, teary eyes turning toward Meri, who beamed.

“Hey, squirt. Thanks a lot for running off to space without me.”

It was obvious Lance wanted to say something to that, but he seemed not to know _what._ Akira had pulled Shiro’s arm over his shoulder, and Shiro was doing anything he could not to show how much the wound in his side ached, keenly aware of the silent bunker around them and the looming threat of the Galra invasion. He cleared his throat. "Maybe we should..."

“Right,” Meri said. She fired off a finger gun at Lance and straightened, falling back into her Altean form. “We’ll revisit this later. Right now, we need to leave.”

“Leave?” Allura asked. “No, Meri, we still have to--”

“Sorry,” said Akira, cutting off Allura. “Are we just _not_ gonna mention the fact that Naomi can apparently shapeshift? Seriously?”

“I’m also an alien,” Meri said, flourishing her hand beneath her ears and her _glaes_ in a very Vanna White sort of gesture. She grinned. “Did I forget to mention?”

Akira lifted the hand that wasn’t supporting Shiro and pinched the bridge of his nose. “So you came to us and said, oh, hey, I think your families were abducted by aliens, and _then_ , instead of, oh, _I don’t know_ , telling us who you were, you showed us a shitty YouTube video of something I’m guessing you _actually recognized_ as an alien space ship?”

“The Blue Lion,” Meri said. “And yeah. What?” She glanced from Akira to Karen, who were both staring at her like she’d just grown a second head. “I’ve spent the last thirteen years stranded, alone, on an alien planet. The last _five_ , I’ve been trying to deal with the fact that the army that destroyed my planet has infiltrated your military. I was, like, five aliases deep by the time I came to you as Naomi Smith.”

Allura, who had looked like she was about to protest again that the mission continue, blinked. “Smith?”

Meri smiled. “Who else was I going to name myself after, Allura? Come on.”

Pidge groaned, rubbing their neck as they shuffled toward their mother, Matt at their side. Karen latched onto both of them, wild eyes searching for open wounds. Matt wrapped an arm around her shoulders, melting into her.

“Who are we talking about?” Pidge asked.

“Coran,” said Meri, smiling. “You know Coran. Don’t you? Coran Hieronymus Wimbleton Smythe. The man wouldn’t make it ten feet on Earth without being pegged as an alien, but his name is a surprisingly good source for aliases.”

“Of course it is,” Akira muttered. “Nothing like an alien culture that sounds like it grew out of the doomsday club of old money prep schools.”

Shiro laughed, which only reminded him again of the bullet wound in his side.

Meri clicked her tongue, stepping toward him. “Here,” she said. “Let me.” She pressed her hand to the hole in his armor, and a cool blue glow spread across his side. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Allura, but you can do a staggering amount with ten thousand years of stored Quintessence.”

“She knows,” said Lance. “She once healed a Balmera that was more than half dead.”

Meri twisted, raising an eyebrow at Allura, who flushed. “And, what, did Coran create a sixth lion with his reserves?” she asked dryly.

“I’m mostly certain he’s been burning through it as a way to make up for the fact that he only gets a handful of hours of sleep each night,” said Allura.

“By the ancients, you guys. How did you _survive_ without me?”

Allura smiled. “It wasn’t easy, I assure you.”

The pain in Shiro’s side--both from the bullet wound and from whatever had cracked or bruised in the Galra creature's first attack--slowly subsided, and he glanced down to see smooth, slightly pink skin through the break in his armor. “Thanks,” he said, and Meri smiled.

Karen stared over Matt's shoulder at Shiro, frowning. Her eyes shifted to Meri. “Pain patch?” she asked dryly.

“You expected me to get you out of here with a bullet in your leg?” Meri crossed her arms. “Come on, Karen. Be reasonable.”

“I would have noticed eventually.”

“Yes, and I _did_ promise to explain everything once we were out. Which we should be focusing on doing now.” Meri waved toward the stairs up to the surface.

Akira scowled, sticking close to Shiro even now that he could support his own weight without help. “Where was all this alien healing magic when _I_ got shot?”

Meri smothered a laugh. “Akira. You took a bullet, then jumped out a window and shattered your foot, and two weeks later you’re back to full strength. You think that’s _normal_?”

A thrill of fear trickled through Shiro's weary body, and he turned an accusing glare on Akira, "You _what_?"

Akira’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment, and then he threw his hands in the air in defeat. “Okay. Apparently I’ve been healed by an alien now. Would’ve been nice to get a consent form or something beforehand, but whatever.” His eyes shifted to Shiro. "Oh, don't _you_ start on me. I saw the way you charged that--that-- _thing_."

"Galra," Meri supplied. She paused, then tipped her head to the side. "Well, it used to be a Galra. Not sure it really qualifies anymore. More super soldier--and not it the good, wholesome Captain America way."

Akira narrowed his eyes. "Thanks for clearing that up."

Grinning, Meri slapped his arm—directly on the bloodied bandage. Her hand flared blue again, and Akira’s grunt of pain quickly turned to confusion, then indignation.

“Naomi!”

“You’re welcome,” she said in a singsong. Shiro laughed, ignoring the injured look Akira shot his way.

“Seriously, though,” Shiro said, struggling for a straight face. “We should get going. We’ve still got to find out how far along the invasion is, and what contingency plans Iverson had in place.”

Meri, though, just waved a hand. “Way ahead of you. I’ve got three different covers going at the Garrison. I know basically everything there is to know where Galra are involved.” She smiled, smug, as Shiro and Allura faltered, then simultaneously looked to each other for direction. “How about we get out of here before someone realizes Commander Dickhead hasn’t reported in yet? There’ll be plenty of time for Q&A as we walk.”

Allura looked like she wanted to protest but wasn’t quite sure what to say. She looked at Shiro, who shrugged.

“I mean, if we already have our intel...”

Meri nodded. “All right, then. To the car!” She paused, patting her pocket, and glanced at Akira. “Please tell me you drove here. I’m pretty sure Iverson took my keys.”

“Sorry, no,” Akira said. “I walked all the way from Carlsbad.”

She punched him in the arm, then turned and sauntered toward the stairs, whistling and waving for everyone to follow her. Akira shot Shiro a dumbfounded look, and Shiro patted him on the shoulder. “Aliens,” he said. “You get used to them eventually.”

* * *

“Okay,” Lance said once the Garrison was well behind them. He couldn’t entirely get rid of the sensation of being watched, and he was glad for the empty desert behind them, whatever he’d said about bursting into the flight sim and giving the teaching staff a heart attack. He was glad to be away from there, and he’d be even more glad once they were safe inside Akira’s car.

Well, relatively safe.

Meri seemed to realize Lance was working himself up to ask the question that had been burning at him for the last ten minutes. She turned away from her hushed conversation with Allura and smiled at him, and even in her Altean form, he could see Lena’s smile teasing the words out of him.

“You used to babysit me.”

Meri nodded cautiously, her expression guarded. “It was supposed to be a one-time thing,” she said. “I just wanted to know who it was Blue had chosen.”

"Who Blue had--? I was _five_.”

“So you were.” Meri turned toward him more fully, ignoring the way everyone else had gone quiet, watching in awe or confusion. Lance heard Shiro whispering to Akira, and Pidge to Karen, explaining about the lions and their paladins.

Lance couldn’t tear his eyes away from Meri. “And Blue had already picked me.”

Meri nodded. “If I understood her correctly, she found you on the day your brother was born. That was the first image she had of you, anyway—sitting on the bed with your mother, holding Mateo.”

Lance wanted to sit down—he thought he might have done just that, just straight-up collapsed in the dust half a mile from the Garrison—if not for Val’s hand on his back. “Why? Why _then_?”

“The lions exist a little bit outside time,” Meri said. “They can see… potentials. They don’t know the future, exactly, but they can see a little bit of what people are capable of. They don’t choose paladins based on past accomplishments, but on what they see on the horizon.”

“And, what, Blue looked at a little five year old and decided she was gonna take me away from his baby brother some day?” There were frustrated tears pricking at Lance’s eyes, and he flushed with embarrassment as he locked eyes with Hunk. “That doesn’t sound like the Blue I know.”

“No. It--” Meri rubbed her neck. “I don’t know if your parents ever told you this, but one time, not long after Luz was born, they told me how worried they’d been about Mateo. You were already five, and they’d heard all sorts of horror stories about how some kids got upset about new siblings because they felt ignored.”

“But you were in love with Mateo from day one,” Val said. She had an odd look on her face, a little furrow between her brows as she stared at Lance. Her eyes flicked to Meri. “And that’s why Blue picked him?”

“Yes. No.” Meri sighed. “There are moments in everyone’s lives that crystallize who we are. What we stand for. Defining moments. Things that happen to us that set us on a new path. You… The first time you met your brother, something crystallized inside you. Your compasion. Your desire to protect those around you. The way you so readily take people into your family and never let them go." Meri stepped forward, lifting her hand like she wanted to place it on Lance's shoulder, but hesitating halfway. "Blue saw that in you. She saw how much you _care_."

For a long while, Meri was quiet, and everyone along with her. Lance figured none of them wanted to interrupt the story. He knew he didn't--hell, he didn't know _how_ to respond to this. He'd been a paladin for _thirteen years_.

 _You knew,_ he thought toward Blue's distance presence. _You knew Meri was alive. Why didn't you tell me?_

The only answer he recieved was distant confusion and a deep sense of calm.

"You have to understand," Meri went on. "I surrendered my connection with Blue when we landed here because I knew she was going to need a new paladin. But she didn’t want to let me go. She kept telling me that if we just waited long enough, the other lions would find their paladins, and then she and I could join them. We… fought. A lot. Immortal lions can be incredibly stubborn when they want to. Ten thousand years worth of stubborn. She kept telling me she wouldn’t just take _a_ paladin. She wouldn’t bond with anyone unless she somehow found the perfect person. Someone with so much potential she couldn’t bear to pass them over—even for me.”

“I’m sorry,” Lance said.

Meri only smiled. “Don’t be. I sought out your family so I could find out more about the person Blue had chosen to succeed me, and you know what? She was right.”

A sudden flush of pride washed over him, and an equally strong wave of embarrassment. Lance flushed, casting about for something—anything—to say to shift the attention away from him. “So—what—you found a five year old and started… _oh._ ” His mind went quiet as memories began to surface. Games he’d played with Meri back when he was a kid. Innocent games, the sort of thing anyone might play. Except… “Space Fighters.”

"Space what?” Allura asked. She sounded like the question had been startled out of her, and looked immediately guilty for butting into this conversation.

Meri turned her head toward Allura, but her eyes never left Lance. “The evil King Ooze has taken over the universe,” she said in the same dramatic voice that had once reminded Lance of Saturday morning cartoons. Now, however, it sounded almost sad. “It’s up to you and a small team of space fighters to save the day.”

“You were training me,” Lance whispered.

“No,” Meri said, her face going hard. She turned away from Allura, and this time she didn't hesitate as she settled her hands on Lance's shoulders. “You were a _child_ , Lance. It was a game. I was preparing _myself_. I knew I was going to have to tell you about Voltron eventually, and I wanted to know you—how you thought, what you prioritized. Space Fighters was… an early attempt. Clumsy. I got better over the years.”

_Your destiny lies among the stars, Lance. I know it’s scary, but if you want this, you have to take it._

“You convinced me to go to the Garrison,” Lance whispered.

“You already wanted to go. I just helped you believe you could.” Meri ran her fingers through her hair. “I couldn’t do everything, Lance. I promised myself I wouldn’t get you involved in the war until you turned eighteen. I figured if you went off to the Garrison, learned how to fly, learned some basic self-defense, then you’d be that much better off when the time came.” She flashed a crooked smile. “Of course, then you found the other paladins and ran off to the stars without me, so...” She shrugged. "There went that plan."

Lance laughed weakly, his head in a daze. He remembered quiet nights spent on the bridge with Allura, talking about Lealle, about Meri. Mourning the people he’d never know—and all along he’d counted Meri as part of his family. “Sorry?”

Meri waved off the apology. “I planned to go with you, but I think it’s good I stayed here.” She glanced at Val, still red-eyed and shaken but slowly calming as the high of battle faded, then at Akira and Karen, who had drawn close together to one side. “Zarkon knows how hard it is for a paladin to protect her family. He’s not ashamed to hit us where we’re weakest. I wanted to be with you, but I think I _needed_ to be here.”

Lance looked to Val, reaching out for her hand. She took it, shuffling closer. She hadn’t apologized for killing Iverson, though he could tell the act weighed on her. It made Lance ache, reminding him of the questions he himself had struggled with not so long ago. “I’m glad they had you,” he said to Meri. “I just wish we’d come home sooner.”

Meri smiled, then spread her arms wide. “So… no hard feelings about the whole secretly-an-alien thing?”

Lance laughed, then fell into her hug. It was every bit as warm as the hugs he remembered Lena giving him when he was a little kid woken up by a nightmare. “No hard feelings.”

“Good,” she said, ruffling his hair.

A sudden thought made Lance pull back, blinking at her as the shock of the last half hour faded, giddiness rising to fill the void. “ _Wait_ ,” he said. “You’re a blue paladin.”

Somewhere, someone was groaning, even as Meri began to protest that she “wasn’t _really_ a paladin.” Right. Allura had said something about Meri being insecure in her bond with Blue. Lance touched his finger to her lips to shush her.

“That makes four of us,” Lance said, grinning at Val, who just shook her head fondly. The tension riding in her shoulders eased a little, and Lance grinned wider. “Take _that,_ Keith.”

He smiled as Meri realized what he was saying, her wide eyes going glassy, her smile stretching toward her ears.

 _Four,_ he thought.

Four was a good number.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @phoenixyfriend I feel you should know that when you requested "Lance and the Alteans" for the apology fluff, my mind went straight to Meri. So expect a side story featuring Meri GM-ing a Paranoia campaign sometime in the break between seasons.
> 
> Also coming between seasons: "Kiss, Fake it Better," a hurt/comfort fic about the fall of Altea and Meri's stay on Earth, featuring an awful lot of 5-10 year old Lance and a healthy smattering of 11-15 year old Val. (Expect lots of hurt, because Meri just lost literally everything, but also lots of fluff, because I mean. _Lance_.)
> 
> Also-also! Because I can finally talk about it without feeling guilty about Meri being "dead," everyone should go listen to "Ease My Mind" by Hayley Kiyoko. It's the most Alluri (Allura/Meri) song to ever grace my ears.


	27. Reasons to Fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Team Voltron returned to Earth. Keith, Nyma, Ryner, and Shay snuck aboard Vanda's prison ship and freed a handful of prisoners--and found no trace of Rolo. Meanwhile the rest of the paladins headed to the Garrison, where they were reunited with Akira, Karen, and Naomi--who turned out to be Meri, the previous blue paladin. And Lance's old babysitter, Lena. After a battle with Galra monstrosities that ended with Iverson dead, the group high-tailed it to Akira's car and headed back toward Carlsbad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Offhand reference to (accidental) drug use

Thace walked the quiet halls of the research lab in orbit around the planet Antimar, listening as a woman named Torvoroka lauded the efforts of her team. It took every ounce of skill he’d gained over the past few decades not to let his horror show on his face.

“Resources are scarce, of course,” Torvoroka said. “Even for a project with Lady Haggar’s personal blessing, you can only demand so much. But we get by.”

Thace nodded, forcing himself to look through the windows of the surgical theaters they passed. He didn’t want to. Gods of Altea, he wanted nothing more than to burn this place to ash and be done with it. But he couldn’t. Not until he knew more. This place was listed in the restricted files Thace had hacked as Project Robeast Lab #4, but Torvoroka’s tour had already referenced two other labs connected to hers that Thace hadn’t known about.

He’d known the team on Antimar wasn’t working on robeasts in the truest sense of the word; they were an offshoot of the project with memos tying them back to CORE. That was why he’d come here—he’d hoped to find more about CORE and its objectives. He still hadn’t been able to breach the shroud of secrecy around Haggar’s favorite research initiative, though the things he kept learning about its offshoots painted a dark picture. The research on Vel-17 and the whispers he’d unearthed about its follow-up, Project Balmera. The synthetic Quintessence experiments that had developed into Project Robeast.

And now this.

A creature lay on the operating table on the other side of the glass, eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream, but otherwise immobile. Thace thought it might once have been a Falvian, but little remained now besides four red eyes and six multi-jointed limbs, four of which had been replaced with cybernetic versions. A network of silvery wires covered reinforced skin and a master key device had been grafted to the base of the creature’s skull. He hated that he could now identify the devices on sight, but this was the tenth example he'd seen today.

“You let them feel the pain?” Thace asked, his voice soft.

Torvoroka smiled. “Limited resources, you understand,” she said. “So long as we control their bodies, their minds are of no consequence.”

“Then there is no risk of them breaking free? I had heard that the Champion was equipped with a similar control system.”

The woman waved a hand. “Similar, but flawed. His was an early prototype; we were still using Quintessence as a bridge then. It’s the only thing we’ve found that fully displaces the consciousness of the subject, but it requires the controller take a more… active hand. Our warriors can fight all they want. Their bodies are no longer their own.”

Thace nodded, feeling nauseous. He watched the researchers poke and prod at the inside of one of the cybernetic arms for a few more moments until Torvoroka waved him onward. Thace gave her a few steps’ head start, then slid a small silver disk out of his sleeve and pressed it to the underside of the windowsill. It adhered easily, and Thace moved on with no outward sign of the explosives he’d left behind.

This was the sixth charge he’d set in the base—two by the cell block, two in the administrative areas, one in the “testing chamber,” and now this. He had four charges left, and even knowing how powerful Accords explosives were, he wished he had more to lay. When he blew this pace, he wanted it _gone_.

“How many subjects do you have?”

“Currently?” Torvoroka asked. “Fifty, though the last twenty are still being tested to make sure the key was set correctly. Wouldn’t want to turn them into weapons while they might still get away from us. One escaped Champion is enough, I should think.”

Thace smiled thinly, though he didn’t feel it. Usually he didn’t have a problem feigning interest in this sort of show of depravity, but this… An army of augmented soldiers, awake and aware of what they were being made to do but completely under the control of their Galra makers. An army of warriors taken from the Arena, taken from failed rebellions, taken from Zarkon’s own ranks, sometimes, when a powerful soldier proved unable or unwilling to follow orders.

These test subjects had been selected for their battle prowess, then augmented further. Fifty of them were a match for an entire battalion of sentries, and that was just what was here, in this one lab. From what Thace had read, this was the second generation of cybernetic soldiers.

“And are any ready for deployment?” he asked carefully as they emerged onto a catwalk overlooking a grid of miniature arenas where creatures sparred in pairs and trios. Even from thirty feet up, Thace could hear the wet sounds of fists and claws striking flesh and the sharper metallic clang when metal enhancements clashed. The walls and floor were dented and cracked from the force of the battles, and more than one of the combatants looked near to collapse.

Yet for all the violence, the creatures fought in silence, not a shout or a cry of pain to be heard.

Thace shuddered and dropped two of his remaining four charges into an empty arena near the center of the room.

Torvoroka continued talking, unaware of Thace’s horror at her back. “We’ve got ten here now we’re just about ready to sent to the front lines, and the ones Lady Haggar had us send to you."

Thace paused, frowning. _To us?_

"Right? You said Commander Prorok sent you? From what I hear, we’re finally going to get to see what they can do.”

“Oh?”

She nodded. “Haggar won’t say where she’s sending them, of course, but there was some big fuss just after she lost the Champion a second time. Third time, if you count that debacle on Berlou.” Torvoroka chuckled, then covered her mirth and gestured them onward. “In any case, I think it’s a safe bet to say the paladins of Voltron are going to be in for a nasty surprise the next time they run across our forces.”

Thace nodded, feeling cold. He needed to pass this information along to the paladins, and soon.

Waiting out the remainder of Torvoroka’s tour was nothing short of torture, but Thace managed, as he always did. An hour later, he was gone, dropping his last charge in the hangar just before he boarded his ship and flew away. He hit the switch on his hidden detonator, and watched grimly as the research station tore itself to shreds.

He didn’t mourn the innocents lost with the rest; his mind was already turning toward the other thousands of innocents that might still be lost if Haggar was allowed to unleash her augmented army on the universe.

* * *

Akira’s SUV was not intended to hold ten people.

Karen might have been more bothered by this if not for who, exactly, constituted the extra bodies cramming into what should have been a spacious three rows. The two aliens (Allura and Meri) were sprawled across the back seat, face-to-face and talking a mile a minute the way Karen remembered talking with her best friend in high school after a summer apart--all flailing hands and high-pitched giggles and giddy smiles.

Well. Those smiles were quite a bit more than Karen had ever shared with her ordinary friends. She was happy for them, even if she was still trying to wrap her head around the fact that aliens were real and she'd been working with one for over a month.

The two of them had plenty of room between them for a third person, but no one else seemed overly inclined to spread out. Karen sat behind Akira, who was driving. Val was beside her—miraculously alive, and horrifyingly changed by whatever Iverson had done to her. Beyond Val sat Hunk Kahale, with Lance Mendoza bouncing on his lap, leaning forward every five seconds to interject himself into the conversation happening up front. Pidge was curled up on top of Karen, their head on her shoulder, their arms locked around her torso. Matt and Shiro shared the front passenger seat. (And if the smug grin Pidge had worn when they’d suggested that was any indicator, then Karen wasn’t pouncing on shadows when she spotted currents between them.)

Well, Matt would tell her when he was ready, she supposed. For now, it was enough that he was here. Her heart ached to see how much he and Shiro had been changed by the last eighteen months, and she couldn’t help the trepidation she felt about finding out how many more scars they bore that didn’t show on their faces. And what about Pidge?

“Mom, I went to space,” Pidge muttered sleepily. “I didn’t turn into a teddy bear.”

Karen looked down, realizing she’d been crushing Pidge against her chest. It took a great effort to relax her hold—though it helped that Pidge didn’t bother to heed their own complaint. Karen might well end up with bruises on her back from Pidge’s hands, and she was glad for it. The pain was a reminder that this was real.

“What happened?” Karen asked. She stared at Shiro as she spoke, hoping it would be easier to face him than either of her children.

That hope was dashed as soon as Shiro’s eyes turned her way. She spotted a flash of vulnerability in his face, quickly smoothed over. Matt’s fingers curled around his arm.

“We were captured,” Shiro said in a low voice. “We got to Kerberos, and a race of aliens called the Galra were waiting for us.”

“Waiting?” Akira growled. “What, like--?”

“Like Iverson sent us out there knowing exactly what was going to happen?” Matt asked. Karen had never heard such venom in his voice, like he would have gladly killed Iverson himself if Val hadn’t beat him to it. It was a stranger’s voice, the same way it had been a stranger charging a towering alien monstrosity with a magic sword, and it made Karen’s heart ache. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure we were always meant to be a sacrifice.”

Akira muttered a curse.

Shiro’s shoulders rose and fell, his jaw twitching as his calm facade wavered. “We can’t be sure of that.”

“Like hell we can’t,” Matt said. “He would’ve locked me up for the rest of my life and used me as a lab rat if Pidge and them hadn’t busted me out.”

Lab rat. Karen buried her face in Pidge’s hair and tried to keep her breathing even. She’d seen the unnatural crystalline patches on Matt’s face, seen the change in pigmentation in his left eye. She’d known there had to be an explanation for that, and nothing she’d come up with had been pleasant, but she’d hoped…

“What did they do to you?” Akira hissed. “And who? Are they dead yet? I really friggin’ hope you haven’t killed them all yet, Takashi, because I’ve got a box full of ammunition with their names on it.”

“Akira..."

“Don’t Akira me, Takashi. You’ve been gone for over a  _year._ _Something_ happened. You--” he faltered, breathing deeply and taking his foot off the pedal. The speedometer dipped from nearly ninety to something approaching a legal speed. “I get it if it’s not something you can talk about, Takashi, I _do_. But I’m not blind. I know it was bad, whatever it was.”

Shiro’s eyes fluttered shut, and Akira’s head turned minutely toward him. Pidge, in Karen’s lap, had gone rigid, keeping their head stubbornly down. Hunk and Lance, too, avoided Karen’s gaze—obviously they all knew what had happened to Shiro and to Matt, and they didn’t want to cross any lines. The aliens in the back seat, who had been carrying on a hushed conversation since they got moving, had fallen silent.

“They separated us,” Shiro said. “I stayed on the ship we were first taken to. Matt and Commander Holt each got sent off to different prison worlds.” He hesitated, the silence encompassing all the things none of them wanted to say. “Matt and I really only found each other by chance. We have no idea where Sam is.”

She’d known. From the second Matt and Pidge and Shiro had appeared without Sam there beside them, Karen had known missing was the best she could hope for. Still, the words hit her hard, and she had to draw in a shuddering breath to keep herself from breaking down.

“He’s still alive,” Pidge whispered, their voice sharp-edged as though to stave off argument from their friends. “We’re going to find him.”

“Of course we are,” Karen said, rubbing Pidge’s back. She locked eyes with Matt around Shiro’s shoulders. “We’ll bring him home.”

Matt blinked furiously, and Shiro swallowed, still staring ahead. “I’m so sorry, Karen.”

“You don’t need to apologize.”

“I was pilot. It was my job to bring them back safely.”

Matt whispered Shiro’s name. Akira turned away from the road entirely to look at his brother. Still Shiro stared out the windshield, his jaw set, his face pained. Karen stared at him for a long moment, then huffed.

“Sorry, Pidge,” she said, lifting them up and passing them to Val, who seemed a little surprised at the hand-off, but didn’t protest. Karen unbuckled, pulled herself up on the headrest of Akira’s seat, and leaned over until Shiro had nowhere left to look except at her. “You listen to me, Takashi Shirogane. What happened was _not_ your fault.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Matt smile, holding tighter to Shiro, who swallowed again, his mouth open as though to protest.

Karen tapped the bottom of his chin. “If you want to go toe-to-toe with me in a debate, rest assured I _will_ win. So why don't you spare us all the trouble?”

Slowly, a smile spread across Shiro’s face. “You're not giving me much of a choice.”

“No,” Karen said, swaying with the motion of the car. She wrapped an arm around Shiro in an awkward hug and kissed the top of his head. “You’re here. You brought my kids home. You brought Hunk and Lance and Val home. That’s _more_ than enough.”

Slowly, Shiro returned the hug, the seat and center console between them making him just as awkward as Karen. They’d have to try this again when they were standing on solid ground. For now, she just held on, silently absorbing the way Shiro’s hand shook as it clasped her arm. He seemed so much older than Akira, so much more worn. She’d met him a few times before the Kerberos mission, of course, and Sam had talked about him often enough for Karen to see at least a shadow of how much his experiences had aged him.

It wasn't fair. None of this was fair.

She forced herself to let go before one of them burst into tears, buckled her seat belt again, and took Pidge back from Val.

“Thank you,” Hunk said, a hint of a smile on his face. Though he was looking at Karen, he seemed to sense when Shiro’s head turned toward him, and he smiled a bit wider. “It’s about time somebody mother henned Shiro.”

“Seriously,” Lance muttered. At Karen’s quizzical look, he elaborated. “Shiro’s basically appointed himself team dad. Or team brother, at least,” he added as Shiro turned to protest. “You have, Shiro, don’t lie to me.”

“Have you eaten?” Pidge mimicked. “Maybe you should take a break. When was the last time you slept?”

Shiro flushed crimson. “I only do that because none of you will take care of yourself if I don’t.”

Lance spread his hands as though to say, _there you go_ , and Karen suppressed a smile at the obvious affection they all had for Shiro. “Well that doesn’t surprise me at all," she said.

“No kidding,” said Akira. “Is that the real reason you always wanted a little brother? To coddle him?”

Lance snorted. “I’d like to see anyone try to coddle Keith.”

Akira's head whipped around, his gaze darting to Lance, then to Shiro, who rubbed the back of his head. “Keith?”

“Yeah, funny story...”

“Did you adopt our brother without me?” Akira held up a hand as Shiro started to answer. “No, wait. _Where_ did you adopt our baby brother? You were in _space_. I was under the impression that the number of children who have been lost to the universe was relatively small—as in the occupants of this car.”

Shiro glanced at Matt, rubbing the back of his neck. “I never said he was human...”

Akira gaped at him, then slowly started laughing. “Oh my god, Takashi. Are you the alien that abducted some poor kid with your UFO?”

“W-what? No!” Shiro spluttered. “He’s the one who latched on to me.”

“Not like you fought him on it,” Pidge muttered. “You might as well make him a nametag that says, _Hi! My name is Shiro’s Little Brother._ ”

Akira was grinning openly now, his hands drumming on the steering wheel. “Oh my god, Takashi. This is the best day of my life. Where is he? When can I meet him? Oh my god, I have so many questions."

“You’re not going to interrogate him.”

“Of course not,” Akira said, feigning innocence--poorly. “I just want to welcome our darling little brother to the family. Get to know him a little.”

Before Shiro could respond, Lance leaned forward, draping himself against the center console. “Here’s a primer: he’s loud, he’s angsty, he has a mullet, and he’s the living embodiment of _fight me._ You're gonna love him."

Val’s eyebrows shot up, and she poked Lance in the back of the head, winning a scowl. “Awfully invested in this guy, aren’t we, baby cousin?”

“Shut up,” he said, flushing ever so slightly. “The guy’s had a rough time, okay? I just wanna help him find his forever home or whatever.”

From the front seat, Matt snorted, and Shiro held up his hands before things could turn violent. “What about you guys? Val mentioned that you’d been looking into Pidge, Lance, and Hunk’s disappearance. How did that turn into Val a few thousand light-years from Earth, Karen a prisoner at the Garrison, and _you_ shot—multiple times?” Shiro gave his brother a hard look, and Akira flicked him in the forehead without taking his eyes off the road.

“ _I’m_ not the one who got shot in the gut today, Takashi,” he said. “And, in my defense, no one ever told me teaching was such a dangerous job.”

“Teaching?” Shiro asked.

Akira grinned. “Sure. I was a flight instructor at the Garrison for a couple months. Inspired some kids, wrangled a classroom, consumed copious amounts of alcohol to deal with grading. Attracted my very own midnight hit squad. Inspired some of the cadets to riot. You know.” He shrugged. “The usual.”

Karen couldn’t decide if Shiro looked more horrified or amused, but he eventually settled for laughing into his hand. “ _This_ is why Mom never wanted another kid, you know. She was afraid of what you’d do if left to supervise another human being.”

“Don’t tell me you’re already starting to regret introducing me to this mulleted alien brother of ours.”

“Of course I’m regretting it. I leave you two alone and the castle-ship might not survive.”

Akira’s mouth dropped open in mock hurt, and he reached out to shove Shiro against the window. Shiro rolled with the push, then reached out and brushed his fingers across Akira’s ribs. Akira yelped, swerving dangerously close to the pickup in the lane next to them. Karen latched onto the door handle with one hand, clutching Pidge with the other.

“No roughhousing with the driver,” she said sternly, and Shiro ducked his head, muttering an apology.

Lance, who had toppled onto Val’s lap, snorted. “Seriously. How old are you, Shiro? Twelve?”

“Six,” Shiro and Akira said in unison, and so matter-of-factly it left Lance speechless.

Pidge started giggling into Karen’s shoulder, trying (and failing) to stifle the sound, so it fell to Karen to explain. “They’re leap year babies.” She sighed, staring at the back of Akira’s head. “A fact this one doesn’t let me forget about.”

Hunk cooed, Pidge giggled harder, and Lance’s face absolutely lit up in delight. “Shiro!” he cried. “Why did you never mention this? You’re not team dad, you’re the baby! We could have been spoiling you rotten!”

In the back of the car, Allura whispered, “What’s a ‘leap year baby?’” and Meri launched into a hushed explanation while Shiro rubbed the back of his head.

“Why do you think I kept quiet?”

“No fair!” Lance whined.

Shiro just laughed, the sound shaking his whole body, and Matt curled up against his chest with a contented sigh. “It’s good to see you like this again,” he said in a low voice. “It’s been too long.”

That seemed to startle Shiro, who stared down at Matt for a long moment, a smile playing across his face. “Yeah,” he said. “It has.”

Pidge caught Karen’s eyes and gave an exaggerated wink before turning and launching themself at the back of Akira’s seat. “So,” they said. “Hellion. I see you haven’t burned the Garrison to the ground yet.” They clucked their tongue. “I’m so disappointed in you.”

“You’re one to talk,” Akira shot back. “Unleashed on the universe at large and you haven’t even cooked up any paradoxes? And you call yourself a gremlin.”

Pidge grinned expectantly at Shiro and Matt, who watched Pidge and Akira's exchange with narrowed eyes.

“Do you two… know each other?” Matt asked slowly.

“We met at the memorial,” Akira said with a shrug. “We’d both just lost a brother—or, well, not, since you’re both sitting right there—and neither of us wanted to deal with the condolences.”

“Oh, I wanted to deal. I just thought it might be rude to punch the next person to tell us how _wonderful, brave, promising_ young men you both were,” Pidge corrected. “As if anyone there really knew you.”

Akira tipped his head, conceding the point. “Anyway, we spent the whole time huddled in a corner snarking about Iverson and the other higher-ups and chasing away anyone who got too close. Karen had me and Mom and Dad over for dinner a couple times, and I spent the last weak of my leave at her place—I’d been in Ohio, but doing nothing was just making it worse, so I came back early, only to find out Iverson wouldn’t give me another contract flight anyway.”

“Akira and I stayed in touch,” Pidge added, crossing their arms on the headrest. “Skyped when we could, texted the rest of the time. Actually, he's the first person I came out to.”

Shiro’s face softened. “Really?”

Akira nodded. “I was pretty up front about being trans when I came to stay with Karen and Pidge for that week. Didn’t have the mental energy to keep up an act, and was already too pissed at the world to deal with the fallout later if it turned out to be a problem.” He met Karen’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Lucky for me neither of them gave a shit.”

Rolling her eyes, Karen pulled on Pidge’s arm until they sat back down. “Never in a million years, Akira.”

He smiled, and Matt flashed Karen a brilliant grin—a grin she knew well, and one that never lost its ability to take her breath away. It was the smile she'd seen when Sam had left on his first mission since Matt’s birth. It was the smile Karen had seen the day Matt came out to them and Sam immediately ran out for rainbow sherbet, lamenting that it wasn't _really_ rainbow. It was the smile she saw, sometimes, when he found out about her big cases—the ones that really mattered, the ones she took because she believed in her client, not because it paid the bills. The smile he wore whenever Pidge won a science competition in middle school or showed off their latest bit of programming.

It was a smile of pride so pure it burst out of him like sunlight, and it left Karen breathless.

“Anyway,” Pidge said. “A few months later, when I was at the Garrison and starting to question, I called Akira all--” They paused very slightly, and Akira jumped in, speaking with the same cadence, their voices blending together. “’Akira, how do you know if you’re really a girl?’”

Akira let out a mortified chuckle, shaking his head. “Okay, now keep in mind I was in Berlin at the time, so, sure, Pidge called me at, like, seven, but it was three o’clock in the goddamn morning for me.” Pidge pressed their face against the back of the seat, shaking with soft laughter as Akira pressed a hand to his forehead. “So Pidge calls, wakes me up out of a dead sleep, and I have to be up in less than four hours to head back to the states. I’m at _least_ eighty percent asleep. So I just say, ‘If you have to ask, you’re not,’ and hang up.”

Lance burst out laughing, the sound quickly smothered, but Val was leaning forward, her elbows on her knees, her eyes alight with interest. Hunk and Matt were both grinning, and Shiro was red-faced with the effort of not laughing openly at his brother’s discomfort.

Akira shot a dirty look at him anyway as he went on. “So of course I wake up three hours later, _horrified_ , because I’d just hung up on them when they were asking a serious question. I’m sitting there in my hotel room thinking I’m the worst trans role model ever and convinced they’re never going to speak to me again, but I call anyway, even though it’s getting close to midnight.”

“Like I’d be asleep at midnight,” Pidge muttered. “I’m not geriatric.”

“And Pidge,” Akira pauses, shaking his head. “Pidge picks up in this weird-ass transcendent state like, ‘maybe I’m _not_ a girl.’” Pidge dissolved into another fit of laughter, and Akira joined in this time. “I thought I’d broken you!” he wailed.

Pidge was hiccuping now, wiping tears of mirth from the corner of their eyes. “The best part?” they said. “The _best_ part, was when Iverson stopped me in the hall the next day and accused me of being high, and I just stared him straight in the face and said, _High on_ _fucking_ _education, sir,_ and kept right on walking. He was so aghast he didn’t even manage to reprimand me before I was out of there.”

Karen just shook her head as the car reverberated with the sound of laughter. She let it wash over her, content for the first time in months.

* * *

"And I mean, I couldn't just _walk around_ in full armor and everything," Meri said, spreading her hands wide as though to protest Earth's ignorance. "I tried it once, back when I first woke up. Did _not_ go over well with the locals."

Allura smiled, pulling her knees up toward her chest as she watched Meri talk. They were both sitting sideways on the bench seat, Meri's knee just brushing the toe of Allura's boot. Despite everything--Meri's strange Earth clothing, the slightly nauseating motion of the car--Allura couldn't shake off the giddiness that had overtaken her when Meri had appeared, alive and every bit as radiant as she'd been the day they first met.

"So what did you do?" Allura asked.

Meri shrugged. "Fumbled my way through learning English. Stole some DVDs so Blue could help me out."

"DVDs?"

"Oh, sorry." Meri scratched her neck sheepishly. "Like holo-vids, but played on a physical screen. Anyway, I considered trying to make the translator portable, but I was afraid I'd end up ruining it. Thank the ancients Sa was always trying to get us to manage without those things, right?"

Allura's smile faltered.

"Oh, shit." Flinching, Meri dropped her gaze. "Sorry. I guess it's still pretty fresh for you, huh?"

"Not quite a hundred quintants," she said. If she closed her eyes, she could see see Sa, energetic and earnest, switching rapid-fire from one language to another as he explained to a livid castle crew why he had disabled the universal translator again. It had become such a common occurrence by the end that nearly everyone spoke at least two languages. Sa and Allura's mother, who still sometimes missed the low-tech life of a deep-space trader, each knew at least seven, and could often be found quizzing each other in quiet corners.

Meri's hand came to rest on Allura's knee, and Allura met her eyes.

"It's not your fault, Meri."

"I know, but..." Meri sighed, leaning against the seat back. "I've had time for the pain to dull a little bit, but I remember how hard it was at first. I wanted to be there for you when you found out."

Allura laced her fingers with Meri's. "You're here now."

A distant voice tickled Allura's ear, and she gave a start as she looked down at the helmets piled up on the floor of the car.

"Quiznak," Allura muttered, digging hers out. In the rush of reunions, she'd forgotten all about the rest of her team. Unease trickled through her as she put her helmet on. "Coran. Sorry. Is everything all right?"

* * *

The Green Lion's cloak dropped as she neared the castle-ship, flickering into being for just a moment before she passed from Coran's line of sight.

"Everything's fine," he told Allura. "The rescue team is just returning from the prison ship with a handful of prisoners."

"Rolo?" Allura asked.

Coran closed his eyes. "No sign of him, I'm afraid." Zelka reported that the Green Lion was settled in her hangar, and Coran quickly started a scan of the area around the asteroid belt where they'd hidden the castle-ship. "The mission went rather smoothly, actually. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before Vanda realizes her prisoners have disappeared, but for now all's quiet. Have you finished at the Garrison yet?"

Allura hummed, smug as a nesting fenna. "As a matter of fact, we're on our way to Hunk and Lance's families now."

"It went well, then?" Coran asked slowly, suddenly suspicious of Allura's coy tone.

"Very," she said.

"You found the information we need?"

"And then some. Would you like to say hello?"

Coran frowned. "Hello? Allura, what--?"

"Coran!"

The air went out of Coran's lungs as a familiar, _impossible_ voice replaced Allura's on the comms, bright and cheery and bursting with impatience. For a long while, he couldn't quite remember how to speak.

"Quiznak," he whispered. "Meri?"

Meri huffed, the sound balanced on an edge. To one side lay tears, to the other, laughter. "You should have given him more warning, 'Lura. I think he's broken."

Allura's response was faint, but not inaudible. The two girls must have been pressed close together if they were sharing the comms in Allura's helmet. "At least _he's_ not in the middle of battle."

Meri laughed, and it was the same bright, easy laugh that had so often graced the castle's halls. Meri's laugh was tied together in Coran's mind with Lealle's smile, with the mischievous crinkle of Allura's eyes. With pranks and games and competitiveness and a time when war had been little more than a rumor from the far reaches of the universe. Meri's laugh was inexorably linked with all the simple joys Coran had thought were long gone from the universe.

"Meri?" Coran repeated, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat, trying to formulate even a single coherent question. "How--? When did you--?"

"I stole a cryopod," Meri said softly. "I wasn't about to leave you two to deal with this on your own."

Coran blinked furiously as his eyes filled up with tears. "Of course not," he said, sniffling. "You're not a blue for nothing, now are you?"

"What can I say?" Meri's voice had dropped low, her breath wavering with tears of her own. "I learned from the best."

* * *

It was a half hour’s drive from the Garrison to the Carlsbad city limits, and Lance (somehow) managed to make it all that way without derailing the conversation too badly. He didn’t _want_ to derail it at all. Not with Pidge and their mom talking about alien tech and Iverson’s face when Karen had stormed into his office after the supposed training accident. Not with Matt’s peaceful smile visible around the side of the passenger seat as he watched his mom and Pidge. Not with Shiro and Akira laughing over all their childhood exploits—like the time Shiro had faked an alien transmission as a cadet at the Garrison. Once the faculty realized that Akira had an ironclad alibi, they’d actually started to panic, never once stopping to think that Takashi Shirogane, the Garrison’s rising star, might have a hand in the chaos.

They were all so _happy_ , happy in a way Lance honestly couldn’t ever remember seeing them. Pidge was always too distracted with projects and troubleshooting and the search for their dad to be really content, and as for Matt and Shiro…

No. Lance wasn’t going to interrupt that, any more than he would interrupt the hushed conversation between Allura and Meri (Meri! God, would he ever stop being surprised at that?) in the back seat. He fidgeted the whole trip, leading to more than one complaint from Hunk about Lance’s bony butt and some knowing looks from Val. Both of them, he had to say, seemed just as reluctant as Lance to cut short the family reunions happening around them.

But then he caught sight of the familiar Carlsbad skyline, and all thoughts of self-control went out the window. “So where are we going?" he asked, launching forward between the front seats. "My house?”

Akira stopped halfway through a story about Shiro’s diehard appreciation for antiquated memes, then swore and dug in his back pocket for his phone. “Sorry, sorry.”

“It’s no big deal,” Lance said, squirming. Hunk kept his hands on Lance’s shoulders to hold him steady. “I just didn’t know if you needed me to navigate.”

“No, ah—Takashi, hey, find Carmen Mendoza’s number for me? Should be in my recents.” Akira passed his phone over, then turned to flash a tense smile Lance’s way. “The Kahales were going to get your family and go somewhere Iverson wouldn’t look for them. I don’t actually know where that is.”

“They are okay, then?” Karen asked, shifting Pidge so she could lean forward. “I didn’t know--”

“They’re fine,” Akira said. “I felt like shit for leaving you, but I did at least get the others out.”

He took his phone back from Shiro as Karen assured him she didn’t blame him for leaving her. Pinning the phone between shoulder and ear, Akira tapped one finger on the steering wheel, checked his blind spot, then got over to the right lane.

“It’s me,” Akira said to whoever had picked up the other line. Tía Carmen? Or did someone else have the phone? Beside Lance, Val had gone rigid, her hands folded in front of her face, knuckles tapping against her pursed lips. “Yeah. Yeah, everything’s fine. We’re on our way back now with—ah--” Akira glanced over his shoulder. “No, you know what? I’m not telling the whole story over the phone. Where are you?” He went silent for a moment, then nodded. “On Canal Street? No, yeah, I know the area. We’re, like, ten minutes away.”

Lance couldn’t hold himself back any longer. He grabbed Akira’s elbow and opened his mouth to ask—ask--

He stalled, finding himself at a loss for words. All he could think was, _I want my mom,_ over and over and over again like he was five years old again and lost at the grocery store, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to ask that in a way that didn’t make him sound completely pathetic.

Akira’s small, dark eyes found Lance’s, and Akira smiled. “Hey, can you put Rosario on for a second? No, it’s not—just put her on, okay?” Nodding to himself, Akira passed the phone back to Lance. “It’s all yours, kid.”

For an embarrassingly long moment, Lance just stared at the phone in his hands, his brain outright refusing to process anything beyond the rubbery texture of Akira’s red phone case. He lifted the phone to his ear just in time to hear his mother say, “Hello?”

One word. One freaking word was all it took. An avalanche of emotion barreled into him, and he doubled over, biting his knuckle to keep from sobbing as he was swept away by memories of birthdays and summer vacations and middle school recitals and Skype calls from the Garrison and family dinner every weekend (sometimes every other, but he’d always hated having to skip a week, even when the faculty was breathing down his neck.)

It was his _mom_ , and somehow the constant, near-crushing weight of homesickness that had kept him company everywhere he went hadn’t prepared him for the moment he realized he really was home.

“Hello? Akira? Are you there?”

Hunk folded himself over Lance, wrapping his arms around Lance’s shoulders and laying his head on Lance’s back. The warm weight was a comfort, but Lance still couldn’t remember how to make his tongue work. His mother’s voice had pooled in the back of his throat, too much and too close and as foreign as it was familiar. It was soft, the way she always was when talking to someone she didn’t know well, and Lance could hear her consciously suppressing her thick accent, the product of half a lifetime spent in Cuba and English learned only after she’d moved to the States and married Lance’s father.

The sound of her voice dragged Lance back to his childhood—to bedtime stories told in Spanish and family recipes translated into English so Lance and his mother could both practice their languages, to arguments about curfew and about things he’d said without thinking that had hurt Mateo’s feelings, to coming home from school heartbroken because his first girlfriend had dumped him, and his mother bringing him hot chocolate, running her fingers through his hair, and telling him over and over again all the things his ex was missing out on, all the things a real love would see and cherish.

The air in Lance’s lungs had gone stale, and he forced himself to breathe. It was a feeble, wavering sound that hardly cleared his head and only brought more tears to his eyes. Shiro’s hand came down on the back of Lance’s neck, comforting. Steadying.

“No,” his mother said, her voice muffled, like she was talking to someone else in the room with her. Lance heard distant voices, ones he could almost pin to the rest of his family. “No, he’s not—I think we might have dropped the call. Should I try back?”

Lance’s heart seized at the thought of losing this connection, even for a moment, and the vice around his throat finally loosened. “Don’t hang up,” he whispered.

His mother went silent, the voices around her still skittering in a digital murmur that didn’t make it quite into the realm of words. For a long moment, the only other sounds were the tires against the road as Akira pulled them off the highway onto surface streets, and Lance’s own breath echoing in the hand he had cupped over his mouth.

Finally, his mother spoke again, her voice as soft as his and trembling on the verge of tears. “Say that again.”

The half-heard voices around her tapered off, and Lance closed his eyes, swaying on a rising tide of tears. “I said, please don’t hang up, Mamá.”

Her breath hitched, which tipped Lance clean over the edge from tenuous control to shuddering sobs. “Mijo,” his mother said, her voice cracking. “Alejandro, baby, where are you? What happened? Are you okay?”

Hunk squeezed Lance tighter, and Val’s head came to rest against Lance’s arm, and he tried to draw in enough air to speak. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m okay. I—I—”

“Is that Lance?” Mateo’s voice came through the speaker quite suddenly, loud and shrill and so, _so_ excited, and Lance found himself crying harder, even as the sound of Mateo’s voice shifted, like he’d teased the phone away from their mother. “Lance? Is that you? Are you coming home? Is Val there?” There was another commotion in the background. A shout, maybe a sob, raw enough to spear Lance through the heart.

Lance breathed in through his nose and let it out slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Mateo, she’s here. Are Tía Carmen and Tío Marco there? Tell them Val’s okay. She’s here with me. We’re on our way.”

Another brief scuffle. Then Mateo’s voice, slightly muffled. “No, Lance just said she’s there! I _told_ you she was okay!"

“Lance,” Luz said, stealing the phone away from Mateo, who continued to argue with someone in the background. “Lance, where did you go? Everyone kept saying you were dead, but Val said you weren’t, and then she left, too, and everyone said _she_ was dead."

“Luz--” Lance said, his heart breaking.

Before he could say anything more, Luz squealed, “Hey! Give it back!”

“Lance? Lance, did you say Val’s there? She’s—she’s okay?”

Lance’s eyes popped open. “ _Sebastian_?” he asked, glancing at Val, who sat suddenly straighter. “Shouldn’t you be--”

“You’re swarming him. For goodness sake, everyone, one at a time.”

“But _Dad_!”

Then, suddenly, everyone was talking at once. Lance couldn’t get more than two words in before someone was talking over him, pulling the phone away from somebody else and asking what had happened, how far away they were, whether Hunk and Pidge were with him. Lance was bawling by this point, bawling and laughing and letting Hunk and Shiro and Val keep him grounded as the voices of his family threatened to sweep him away.

He wondered what the others were thinking, seeing Lance talked over like this. When had he _ever_ struggled to get a word in, with his family on Earth or with his family in space?

Except just now he didn’t _want_ to talk. He’d rather just listen to the voices he hadn’t heard once in more than two months.

“I’m here,” he said every time there was a lull in the conversation. He had to wipe the snot from his face and heave a few unsteady breaths before he could get the words out, but he managed every time. “I’m here.”

* * *

Hunk and Lance’s family had checked into a quiet motel in the tourist district, two stories tall with the doors all facing the parking lot. It was the sort of place Hunk associated with the road trip he'd taken once with his Uncle Eli--arriving late, crashing on beds of questionable quality, then rising early and getting back on the road, bound for bigger and better places. It certainly wasn't the sort of place you lingered in. When Akira finally pulled into a parking spot, Lance was the first one out the door, breaking out of Hunk’s embrace and sprinting up the stairs to the upper floor, where he raced past door after door, Akira’s phone still pressed to his ear.

The others were all climbing out, too, but Hunk felt groggy and uncoordinated, a writhing mass of anxiety in his gut that he didn’t want to be there. Why now? His moms were just up there with Lance’s family, which burst out of one of the rooms, Lance’s brother and sister the first to tackle him, very nearly knocking the phone out of Lance’s hand and over the balcony railing.

Hunk’s stomach knotted still tighter as he forced himself to stand, if only because Val was still behind him, and she deserved to be able to go to her family.

“Are you okay?” she asked, laying a hand on his arm.

Hunk nodded, because he _should be_ okay. There was no reason for him to be so scared right now. His moms were there, and his Uncle Eli was there, and all he had to do was go up there and he’d be _home_. He should have been happy. He should have been shouting for joy and tearing off after Lance.

Instead, he felt like he was going to be sick, and he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow, some way, this was going to turn out to be a lie. Akira had said everyone was okay, and Lance had repeated the same thing through the roar of indistinct voices Hunk could pick out through the phone’s speaker. But Hunk couldn’t help the voice whispering that they were wrong. Iverson's men had gotten here first, somehow, or the Galra had, and Hunk’s family _wasn’t_ just upstairs waiting for him.

Through a momentary lull in the chatter overhead, Hunk heard Mateo’s voice ring out. “Where'd you get that costume? You look like a Power Ranger!” Lance let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a sob, which was quickly muffled by fabric and the sound of his mother murmuring soothing phrases in endless refrain.

Everyone had noticed Hunk’s hesitation by now, and though they all kept their distance—all aside from Val, who seemed determined to take this at Hunk’s pace, which would have made him feel horribly guilty if he wasn’t immensely grateful—Hunk could feel everyone’s eyes watching him. Pidge had claimed a perch on Akira's shoulders, and Matt had his face buried in Shiro's chest in an effort to ease the headache that had hit him hard somewhere around the city limits.

Hunk gathered himself, then started up the stairs at a crawl. Air was hard to come by, and he clung to the railing like the stairs might vanish from underneath him at any moment. (This had to be real. It _had_ to be.)

Lance was laughing, and Hunk thought maybe he should apologize to Val for slowing her down, but he was having enough trouble breathing already without trying to speak on top of it.

Then he was at the top of the flight of stairs, and a young man with Val’s dark curls and somewhat lighter skin broke away from the rest of the Mendozas to sprint toward her. Val had time to whisper his name, Sebastian, before he flung his arms around her, spinning her in almost a full circle as she held onto him with the desperate grip of a drowning woman.

“ _Hunk!_ ”

Hunk turned toward the voice—his mom’s voice, shrill and fragile and more than enough to shatter the floodgates on Hunk’s tears. Lana towered over the entirety of the Mendoza family, but it was Akani who broke toward him first, her long, curly hair streaming behind her. She crashed into Hunk with the force of a breaking wave, clutching his arms and pressing her forehead and nose to his and breathing in a gasp. Hunk wanted to do the same, but he couldn’t breathe at all, couldn’t do anything except bury himself in his mama's chest as his mom and his uncle joined them.

"I'm sorry," Hunk said, the words escaping him on a wheeze. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

"What are you apologizing for?" Akani whispered into his hair. "You don't need to apologize for anything, baby."

Hunk just shook his head and said it again. _I'm sorry. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry._ The words pounded in time with his racing pulse, blotting out all else. He didn't even know why he was apologizing--for scaring them? For disappearing? For the fact that he'd only just made it home and he was already planning to leave again? He was being pulled in two directions, his family's hands anchoring him to the Earth; Shay and the Yellow Lion pulling him toward the blackness of space. Shay and Yellow and the millions upon millions of stars out there with trillions and trillions of people who needed his help.

He wished he could forget about all that, if only for a few minutes. He wished he could be as happy to be home as everyone else.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't," Eli said. "It's okay. We've got you. It's going to be okay."

Hunk wanted desperately for it to be true. So he closed his eyes and clung to his mother and tried his hardest to forget for just one moment that this fight-- _his_ fight--was not yet over.

* * *

“You’re sure you want to do this?”

Thace stared at the equipment he had laid out before him—his dagger, his sword, a single-use compact pistol (for the worst-case scenario). Two data chips, one red and one black, already loaded with two different viruses. And every last explosive disk he or Dez could get their hands on.

With a sigh, Thace met Dez’s eyes. “You and I both know this isn’t the time for caution. I have to act.”

“Never thought I’d hear you say that,” Dez muttered, rubbing her jaw. “You and me, Thace. We’re the ones who were always gonna be here, come supernova or black hole. We’re the ones who were gonna stand firm.”

Thace’s lips quirked toward a smile as he began slotting his weapons into place—sword at his hip, dagger hidden beneath his armor. “You’re talking like I’m going to die.”

“After the fuss you kicked up at that lab?”

“Ex-lab,” Thace corrected. His ears quivered, and Thace was glad he wore his hair long to cover them. He’d mastered his face long ago, but his ears were another matter entirely. Family trait, that. “And they don’t know it was me. I covered my tracks, Dez.”

She chuckled. “You covered them as best you could, I’m sure. You’re luck’s gonna run out sometime.”

Thace slid the data chips into hidden sheathes implanted under his claws. There was still a twinge of pain each time he forced something into this hiding spot, but he’d done it often enough not to visibly flinch. “There are risks worth taking, Nadezda.”

For a moment, Dez just stared at him, her face a stony mask. “Don’t you go quoting Keena at me. Vrekking—You realize she went and got herself caught, too, right?”

“And it was worth it. So is this.”

Dez didn’t argue that point—though in all honesty, Thace would have eaten his own dagger if she had. Dez was a professional, yes, and she worried about security. She worried about Thace. They both knew the odds of him escaping this one alive were slim at best.

But she knew as well as he did how important it was to destroy Haggar’s new super-soldiers before they slaughtered whole worlds.

Thace divided the explosive discs into four hidden pockets, slid the detonator into his belt, then grabbed the last item on the table—a palm-sized screen he’d taken out of the hidden compartment in his ship only once before. It was connected to the device implanted behind his sternum: a dead man’s switch. If the sensor in his chest detected a drop in vitals, every disc he’d planted, along with those still on his body, would detonate.

If he was going down, he was taking a piece of Zarkon’s army with him. He just hoped it was the one he meant to.

“I don’t expect I’ll see you again,” Thace said once everything was ready. Death or escape awaited him; there would be no covering this up. No return to his life of espionage. He, like his sister, was done with this hunt, one way or another.

Thace crossed his arm across his midsection—as close to a formal salute as they could risk in the field—and Dez returned the gesture.

“Swift flying, Thace,” she said. “Altea protect you.”

* * *

There were, of course, questions to be answered. Meri had always known there would be. You didn’t reveal to some of your closest friends that you’d been living under a variety of pseudonyms for the last decade-plus without a few raised eyebrows.

Eli, of course, was delighted.

“I _told_ you!” he crowed, still hanging off Hunk and jabbing a finger at Karen, who pretended not to be affected by the gloating. (Meri could see the vein throbbing in her jaw.) “I told you it was alien abduction!”

Meri whistled the X-Files theme, earning incredulous looks from all the humans and a perplexed frown from Allura.

Meri leaned in close to Allura, fighting to keep her attention on anything but the way her heart fluttered at their proximity. “Human thing,” Meri whispered. “Proof positive that this planet is a cultural masterpiece. We're marathoning it later."

There was no reason to whisper, nor was there any reason for Allura to giggle into her hand as though Meri had just told some juvenile joke about Coran’s slippers. It was just the rush of reunion, Meri reasoned. It made everything feel just a little bit more surreal, just a little bit more like a game.

_Thirteen years._

Allura looked no different. Meri probably didn’t look much different outside her shifts, for that matter. A little more strain around her eyes, a new scar on her ankle from back when she was first learning to access the vast store of Quintessence inside her. She’d known from the start she couldn’t rely on human medical facilities. However advanced they were (moderately, as it turned out, but still a far cry from Altean tech) there was no telling how any Earth medicines might react to Altean physiology. And that wasn’t even considering the uproar it would cause if anyone noticed Meri wasn’t quite human.

Still, it seemed something should have shifted in the time they’d been apart. Maybe that was just the humans’ influence on her.

Meri looked to where Lance stood with his family, dragging on Hunk’s arm and bouncing with an uncontainable energy. He’d been just a child when she’d first met him, hardly more than a toddler, and when she’d last seen him he still had the slightly lanky look of someone in the middle of a growth spurt. But he'd filled out these last few months. The nervous, hopeful sixteen-year-old she’d sent off to the Garrison to train couldn’t have filled out a paladin’s armor as well as the young man before her.

“Are you okay?” Allura asked, pressing her shoulder against Meri’s.

Meri glanced at her, smiling. “A little stunned,” she admitted. “After waiting for so long, I was starting to think today would never get here.”

Allura looped her arm around Meri’s, clasping her hand. “I suppose I got off easy in that regard, then, didn’t I?”

“I dunno. I never thought you were dead.” Meri paused, tipping her head. “I feared you were. But I never really believed it.”

“Shame,” Allura said. “Finding out I was wrong was spectacular.”

All too soon, it was time to move. Coran alerted Allura to motion in the vicinity of Vanda's prison ship. The brief respite the other paladins— _other_ paladins! By the ancients, Meri was going to have to get used to that—had won with their stealth was over, and the team needed backup. There was no time for discretion. Allura and Shiro called the Black Lion, who set down in the parking lot outside the motel, much to the shock of the other patrons. They gathered in windows and doors, a few creeping out into the open with phones raised to capture the moment.

Luz and Mateo shrieked in delight as Black lashed her tail, both of them tugging on Lance’s arms and demanding to know where the lion had come from, what she did, whether or not she was alive.

It was Karen who finally asked what they all must have been thinking. “What now?” She carded her fingers through Pidge’s hair and looked to Matt. “We just sit here while you disappear again? Off to this war of yours?”

The paladins all blanched, glancing at one another and studiously avoiding their parents’ eyes. Lance ruffled Mateo’s hair and hugged Luz against his side, forcing a smile as their high spirits faltered.

“No,” Meri said, before anyone could answer. Every eye turned her way, and she breathed deeply, squaring her shoulders. It had been just like this ten thousand years ago—a tumultuous home-coming. A fleeting moment with her parents, who had retired to Altea a decade or so earlier to run a multi-galactic trading company. An impending battle.

Then she’d left, and she’d never seen them again.

“Vanda knows who you are,” Meri said, allowing herself a faint touch of Quintessence to shift into a neutral expression—easier by far than simply controlling her emotions, and one of several bad habits she’d picked up while on Earth. “She knows how important you are to the paladins. It’s too dangerous to leave you here without a guard.”

Hunk’s eyebrows shot up. “Uh… we don’t _have_ guards.”

Meri had figured, but it still struck a chord in her. She suspected the bustling Castle of Lions she remembered was a thing long gone. “Then they’ll have to come with us.” An uproar greeted this sentence—confusion from the parents, excitement from Luz and Mateo, outright horror from most of the paladins. “Just for now,” she said, raising her voice. “Just until we can be sure they’re safe. The castle is at least defensible. That’s the safest place in this solar system right now. Right?”

She glanced at Allura, who nodded, glancing guiltily at Shiro. “I agree with Meri. You know Zarkon isn’t afraid to target noncombatants.”

That silenced the paladins, though their families only looked more unnerved. They’d all heard by now that Voltron was at war, but Meri doubted very much that the reality of the situation had sunk in.

To their credit, however, not a single one of them protested as Allura and Meri led the procession into the Black Lion.

“Good thing you brought Black,” Meri muttered as the cockpit began to fill. Shiro took a seat at the controls, while Meri hovered near Allura by a set of pedestals remarkably similar to the command station on the castle-ship’s bridge. “I don’t think we’d all have fit otherwise.”

And indeed, it was crowded in here with twenty people ranged around the small space. Most of the newcomers stayed close to the rear wall, looking vaguely green as Shiro lifted off, eased away from the parking lot and the small mob gathered to watch the giant metal cat take flight, then punched the engine and took off for the upper atmosphere.

Luz and Mateo, in contrast to the adults, were delighted at the ride, and it was all Lance could do to keep them from climbing atop Shiro as he steered them away from the flashing lights that betrayed the battle already taking place.

“Coran,” Allura said. “We’re almost to your position. Paladins, get ready. As soon as Shiro and I join you, return in pairs to pick up your other halves. Keith, Nyma, you’re first.”

Val touched Lance’s arm as the Black Lion touched down in the hangar. She spoke in a low voice, but Meri’s sensitive hearing picked out the words.

“Do you need me out there?”

“What?” Lance asked. “Val, you’re--”

“New,” she said. “I’ve never flown before. I’ve barely even touched a gun. Unless you need some clumsy navigation, I’m not sure how much help I’m going to be.” Her words were modest, but Meri knew her well enough to see her fear—as did Lance.

He hummed, glancing at the press of bodies headed for the door. “All right. Nyma and I can handle ourselves. Look out for Luz and Mateo for me?”

Val nodded, hugged Lance briefly, then grabbed Luz's hand and towed her across the hangar toward the elevator with a call to follow her.

Meri glanced at Allura. “I’ll be on the bridge,” she said. “I should be able to give you some direction from there.”

She didn’t wait for Allura to answer, just charged out at the tail end of the line. The Black Lion lifted off at once, disappearing back into the void of space. A second later, the Red Lion careened through the atmospheric barrier, hardly slowing as she skidded toward the back wall. Matt grinned, charging forward in true Red spirit and leaping into Red’s mouth as she slid around and loped back toward the exit, passing Blue, who landed more gracefully—and then stumbled when Red sideswiped her.

“Hey!” Lance cried, charging toward Blue (or after Red; Meri honestly couldn’t have said.) He shook his fist at the Red Lion’s retreating tail, then charged up the ramp.

A purr shivered through Meri, as warm and as welcoming as the day Meri had first joined the other paladin hopefuls, but resonating deep within her soul. She slid back into the paladin bond as easily as if she’d never surrendered it, tears springing to her eyes.

 _Soon,_ she promised Blue, charging toward the elevator as it returned, devoid of the humans. _We’ll talk soon._

There was a moment of stillness as Meri stepped onto the bridge. She spotted a pair of Galra manning the forward stations; a young Altean at one of the security drone controls; and Coran, teary-eyed and wearing the same brilliant smile he’d always had for a younger, more mischievous Meri.

His hug lifted her off her feet, and Meri let herself melt into it for a moment—just a moment. There was still a battle to be fought, after all, but for this one instant she let herself bask in the feeling of coming home.

* * *

There was something profoundly disturbing about walking into Blue’s cockpit and finding it already occupied, Lance thought. Especially considering the person at the controls was Nyma. Oddly enough, the realization that Nyma's posture was stiff with the same awkward uncertainty helped ease the tension in the air. They were hopeless messes, but at least they were in it together.

Lance leaned an arm on the back of her seat and shook his head. “Looks like you managed to steal my lion, after all.”

Nyma went rigid for a moment, then caught sight of Lance’s teasing grin and rolled her eyes, the slope of her shoulders softening. “Oh, go cry on your mommy’s shoulder, kid,” she said, urging Blue forward to catch the attention of the Galra fighters as Yellow and Green split off toward the castle-ship to pick up their other paladins.

Lance laughed, feeling giddy at the reminder that, yes, his family was here. His family was okay. He really had just seen them.

Nyma’s fond smile seemed out of place on her, and Lance reminded himself that she was a friend now. More than just a friend. If they were going to copilot Blue, they would have to be family.

“So how does this whole multiple-paladins thing work?” Nyma asked, as though reading his mind.

“Couldn’t tell you.” Lance shrugged. “It’s different for everyone. All I really know is that there’s a mind-meld sort of thing and it’ll make Blue stronger.”

"That's so helpful, thanks."

Nyma twirled between a slew of lasers as Meri came on the comms to give the paladins a rundown of Vanda’s forces.

"She's majorly under-staffed right now, so you guys shouldn't have too much trouble," Meri said. A new window popped up along the left edge of the viewscreen, followed by another. Each showed blueprints of ships, the first a match for the heavily armored support ships, the other for Vanda's prison ship itself. "Vanda hasn't been able to requisition any gunships or other heavy-hitters, but those dropships are tough. She'll have them loaded up with troops to try a ground assault--be ready for them to make a break for the surface. And--here." A blue box flashed near the back end of the prison ship's schematics. "There's a design flaw in this line. Because of the arc of the hull, the shielding in this region is incredibly weak. One or two good hits should knock it out."

"All right," Shiro said. "Hunk and Shay, you're on dropship duty. Pidge and Ryner, crowd control. Matt, Keith, help them both out where you can." He paused, his eyes flickering up to his camera so that it felt as though he was staring directly at Lance. "Lance, Nyma, you're with us. Let's take out this ship."

"Yessir," Nyma said, her voice solemn despite the wry twist to her lips. As soon as Shiro turned away, she reached out and muted the comms. "Does it ever feel weird, taking orders from him?"

Lance frowned. "What do you mean?"

"He's just so... clean-cut. It's like he doesn't even notice that he's leading a band of misfits trying to slip backwards into something grandiose. I keep expecting him to drop the charade and laugh in my face."

"Have you considered that he genuinely believes in us? In _you?_ "

Nyma turned toward him, frowning, then shook her head. "Okay, never mind. You're all goody two-shoes, aren't you? Vrekking novae. You lot are going to ruin me."

Lance grinned as Nyma pulled them around toward the Black Lion and Vanda's prison ship. "In the best possible way," he said. He didn't miss the smile that flashed across her face.

* * *

Val sat between her mother and Sebastian on a couch in a room that reminded her somehow of the student lounge in English building at her old school. Maybe it was the scattered pillows and blankets—the fallout of finals week, when half the program crashed in the lounge when they just couldn’t focus on papers anymore. Maybe it was the eerie quiet, broken only by the hiss of air through vents.

She should have gone with Lance.

Stupid. Val, the girl with zero flight experience, the girl who couldn’t fight to save her life. Who'd almost had a nervous breakdown--still felt like she was on the edge of a nervous breakdown--because she'd shot a heartless bastard who would have killed Shiro without batting an eyelash. What would she have done in the heart of a major space battle?

But she wanted to be there. She wanted to be with Lance and Nyma, even if she couldn’t do a damn thing to keep them safe. It would have been better than sitting here, curled up against her mother, laying out for the paladins’ families what little she knew of the war that had stolen their children away.

“Crystals,” Sebastian whispered, horrified. “I mean— _crystals?_ ”

Val tried for a smile as she looped an arm around his waist. “So New Age, right?” He glared half-heartedly at her, and she sighed, trying her very hardest not to break down as her father’s hand reached behind his wife's back and settled against Val's spine, warm and comforting. “We’re… dealing,” she said. “It’s all pretty new, but Shay’s got the whole thing pretty much under control.”

Karen let out a shuddering breath and slumped forward. She didn’t protest when Akira gave up on pacing and sat beside her. Val couldn’t decide which of them had been hit harder. Shiro and Matt had been gone for so long; they were so changed, and Val could only offer a sliver of the story—not even enough to keep their imaginations from running wild. Matt had been held in a research lab and Shiro--Val wasn't quite sure herself what had happened to Shiro, except that it had involved fighting.

She hadn’t even told Akira that Shiro had lost his arm. She didn’t know how, or whether she should say something at all or leave it for Shiro. At least where Project Balmera was concerned, it was Val’s story as much as Matt’s.

She glanced to the far side of the room, where Luz and Mateo had fallen into a card game with some of the Galra children. Lance had told Val about the refugees only briefly, but he’d said enough for Val to recognize the burly, almost reptilian teen as Zuza and the tiny one in the pink dress as her sister Azra. The others had introduced themselves as Edi and Maka, bickered briefly over whether or not they were allowed to be here, then dragged Lance’s siblings off to play.

It was oddly adorable, even if Tía Rosa looked like she might faint at any moment. Hell, Val might have had a minor panic attack herself at the sight of purple fur and yellow eyes before she reminded herself these weren't the same Galra.

(She was fine. She _was._ As long as she stayed where she could see them.)

Azra put the finishing touches on a paper crown of some sort, gluing a purple flower—star?--into place with Zuza’s help and presenting the final piece to Luz like she was crowning Miss America. Val’s lips twitched as she wondered whether the Miss Universe pageant was going to get space-sued by an intergalactic competition that more accurately reflected the name.

Mateo and Maka crowed and hollered as they faced off in a card game that Val surmised was more _Magic: The Gathering_ and less Go Fish. Maka was very clearly winning, but Mateo didn’t seem to mind all that much. Edi and Luz's match, beside them, was considerably more subdued.

The castle shuddered under the assault from Vanda's forces. It was a slight thing--just a hint of a tremor underfoot that the kids didn't even register. Eli looked confused for a moment before shrugging it off, and Akira visibly tensed. He was the only one besides Val who seemed to have made the connection between the shaking and the unseen battle raging outside.

_I should be there._

Val banished the thought, scooting closer to Sebastian and leaning around him to catch Akira's eyes. "It'll be fine," she said in a low voice. "They know what they're doing."

He seemed surprised, then troubled, and though he nodded, Val got the distinct impression her words hadn't had quite the comforting effect she'd intended.

And honestly, Val couldn't blame him for worrying.

 _Be safe,_ she thought, leaning her head against her brother's shoulder. _Just come back safe._

* * *

“Blue’s got ice breath,” Lance told Nyma, his fingers itching to take the controls from her. It was a petty impulse, but he couldn't help it. He'd never had to sit still and watch while others fought, and now that he was here, he realized it was a special kind of torture. Blue's adrenaline--if robot cats _had_ adrenaline--coursed through the bond, pressing at him to act. He wished there was a way to skip straight to the part where he and Nyma synced up, if only so Lance would have something to _do_ , but if there was one constant in the others’ stories, it was that they only unlocked their bond when the team was in grave danger and right now... they weren’t.

Meri was right--Vanda's fleet was hurting for bodies, and it showed. Pidge and Ryner had already taken out wide swathes of fighters, leaving gaping holes in their formations and freeing the Red Lion to tag-team the dropships with Hunk and Shay. Black had closed the distance to the prison ship, while a cluster of fighters had broken off to try to overwhelm Blue.

Nyma found the ice breath controls and opened up a window in the fleet around her, leaving them with a straight shot to the prison ship, where Black was already hammering at the shields. Vanda's crew fired at them, the lasers slow and clunky, lagging far behind the lions as they came in, Black's next attack shattering the shield. As soon as the way was clear, Nyma and Shiro pounced on the opening, tearing into the ship with lasers, claws, and jawblades, ripping huge, gaping holes in the hull. The lasers gave one last salvo, then went dead as the fighters turned their backs on the Green Lion to swarm Black and Blue--only to be ripped apart by a blast of lightning.

It wasn't even a particularly powerful discharge, by Green's standards, but it left the fleet in disarray, ships scattering as the three lions picked them off one at a time. In the distance, Yellow headbutted one dropship into another, and Red fused them together with a swirl of flame. The last dropship took a hit from her back-mounted cannon and exploded long before it reached the Earth.

In just a few minutes, it was over. The paladins turned toward the quiet prison ship, which hung dead in the air, only a few automatic cannons still operational. They peppered the lions like some sort of bioluminescent squirt guns as the paladins closed in.

“Wait!” Meri called. “Vanda's activated the--”

The first explosion rocked the Blue Lion even as Nyma withdrew, regrouping with Red and Green as the others pulled back the opposite direction. Another fireball blossomed near the prison ship’s secondary engine, then a third at the bridge. Lance called up a BLIP-tech scan and watched in horror and a guilty sort of relief as the vital signatures flickered out one by one.

"The self-destruct," Meri finished. She blew out a long breath. "Sorry. Should have mentioned that sooner, but I didn't think she'd actually use it. Too much like admitting defeat."

"It's fine, Meri," Allura said. The Black Lion spun, taking stock of the situation. The wreckage of a fleet drifted around them, the glow of Quintessence still flickering here and there like dying heartbeats. "It looks like our work here is done. Good job, paladins."

Allura was met with stunned silence, and after a moment Shiro ordered them all back to the Castle of Lions. Black and Yellow pushed the skeleton of Vanda’s ship away from the planet, out to where it wouldn’t get caught up in Earth’s gravity and come crashing down on top of some unlucky city, before following.

 _That’s it?_ Lance thought, watching the ship dwindle in the distance as Nyma turned them back toward the castle-ship. He supposed he shouldn’t be complaining, but after everything they’d learned about Project Balmera and humans’ Quintesssence, it felt as though Zarkon should have had a tighter hold on Earth. To kick him out so easily felt…

Well, it felt like the moment at the top of a roller coaster’s first hill, staring down at the amusement park spread out below you and waiting for the balance to shift. Any moment now, it seemed, gravity would take hold and everything would come roaring down around them.

* * *

The silence was pounding in Val's ears long before the door opened. She shot to her feet as Lance trudged in, followed by the other human paladins, and she looked them over for injuries. They'd just been in battle, and Val was hard-pressed to believe they could emerge unscathed--especially with the frustration darkening Lance's expression. But the furrow of his brow smoothed out as Mateo crashed into him, already chattering a mile a minute.

“Is it over? Did you win? Are they gone? Where are you going next? Can I come? Are you going to take me out in your lion ship? Who’s _that_?”

Lance blinked a few times, hands on Mateo’s shoulders in a feeble effort to slow his rapid-fire interrogation, then slowly turned and followed Mateo’s gaze to Keith, who stood rigid at Shiro’s side, staring at Akira like it was only a matter of time before one of them burst into flame.

Lance grinned, catching Luz as she darted past and raising an eyebrow at the paper crown sitting crooked on her hair. “That’s Keith,” he said.

“Are all aliens that fluffy?" asked Luz, which made Keith’s ear twitch and Lance’s smile widen.

“Not as fluffy as Keith,” Lance said. “But you can’t pet him yet.”

Keith whirled around, lip pulling back to show sharp teeth that had Mateo whispering _awesome!_ as the adults looked on in concern. Val's pulse picked up, too, but Lance just cocked his hip and stared back with a look of such utter smugness it was hard to see any kind of threat in the exchange.

“Yet?” Keith growled. “Lance, I’m not a _dog_.”

“No, you’re a cat,” Lance said.

Shiro placed a hand on Keith’s shoulder before he could throttle Lance. “Keith,” he said, turning him around. “This is my brother Akira. Akira...” Shiro lifted his head, looking so pathetically hopeful Val had to physically restrain herself from cooing. “This is my brother Keith.”

Akira stood up, crossing his arms and tapping his chin like an art critic considering a piece that walked the fine line between true genius and utter garbage. Keith seemed to have forgotten all about Lance; he just watched Akira, his ears laying flat.

Forget Sarah McLachlan. The ASPCA needed to hire Keith to beg for donations.

“So you’re Keith, huh,” Akira said. He had one hand raised to his mouth, but it couldn’t completely hide his smile. “You realize I’m going to have to vet you. We’ve been looking for a baby brother for about twenty years now, and I’m not about to lower my standards just because you’ve won Takashi over.”

“Uh...” Keith looked uncertainly to Shiro, who sighed, his eyes rolling toward the ceiling.

“ _Akira_.”

Akira waved him off. “Three questions, Takashi. I’ve only got three questions.”

“You don’t have to do this, Keith. Akira’s just being a brat as usual.”

“Excuse you. _I_ am an absolute delight.” Akira pressed his hands together, then pointed them at Keith. “Ready? Question one: What’s your favorite color?”

Keith frowned. “Uh… red? I guess?”

Akira nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing like he’d gleaned some profound insight from the answer. Keith squirmed. “Question two: Mint chip or cookie dough ice cream?”

“I… have no idea what either of those are.”

Akira waved a hand. “Fair enough. I’m just going to put you down as cookie dough. You seem like a discerning fellow to me.”

Shiro rolled his head back again, obviously struggling not to laugh. “You only say that because you _know_ Keith’s going to side with me once he actually knows what the options are.”

“Uh-huh, sure Takashi. Keep telling yourself that. Question three.” Akira grabbed Keith by the shoulders and fixed him with an intense stare. “What,” he said, then paused dramatically, “is your most embarrassing story about our dear brother Takashi?”

Shiro jerked back, looking horrified, as Keith’s ears lifted. His eyes darted from Shiro to Akira and back, a slow grin overtaking his face.

“Now he gets it,” Akira said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

“Well...” Keith dragged the word out, his eyes still fixed on Shiro as he ever-so-slowly put more distance between them. Shiro caught the movement, his eyes narrowing.

“Keith,” he growled.

Keith grinned. “There was this _one_ time...”

“Keith, don’t you dare.”

Keith ducked behind Akira, his ears positively quivering. “To be fair, none of us knew those berries were hallucinogenic.”

“ _Keith!_ ” Shiro lunged for Keith, who yelped and leaped over the back of the sofa, bringing his arms up and around to break Shiro’s bear hug. Shiro was bright red, and he chased after Keith, backing him into a corner. He might have caught him then, except Akira chose that moment to leap onto Shiro’s back, grinning wildly.

“You’re going to have to tell me this story later, you realize,” he said to Keith as Shiro tried to throw him off.

Keith backed away, wheezing. “Obviously.”

Akira held on as Shiro thrashed, patting Shiro’s head in a way that might have been soothing if Shiro hadn’t twisted at that moment so Akira had ended up hitting his face more than his hair. “Better get used to this, _little brother._ You’re a middle child now. That means you get to take shit from both sides.”

Val sidled up beside Lance as Shiro threw himself and his brother onto the couch, Shiro landing atop Akira and squeezing the breath out of him. “Is it always this… lively around here?”

Lance was silent for a long moment, and when Val looked at him, she found him blinking furiously as he watched Shiro and Akira. “No,” he said. “It’s actually been a _really_ long time since I’ve seen Shiro like this.”

“Like what?”

“Having fun,” Lance said.

On the far side of the couch, Pidge had joined Keith, whispering something in his ear that made him light up. He nodded, and the pair of them leaned over the back of the couch, Pidge reaching out to poke Akira’s shoulder.

“Hey,” they said. “Come on. We're giving you the tour.”

Akira arched an eyebrow, then squirmed out from under Shiro. "The tour of your castle?"

"And all the secret places Shiro doesn't know about," Pidge said.

Shiro gave them a critical scowl, which only made Akira grin wider. He turned together with Keith and Pidge, and all three of them raced out of the room. Shiro watched them go.

“Okay, now I’m scared.”

“Those three, unsupervised?” Matt asked, turning away from his conversation with Karen. “You should be.”

Shiro smiled, flopping backwards on the couch. All the tension seemed to have drained out of him, and he closed his eyes, his chest rising and falling slowly. Matt was watching him with that same teary-eyed satisfaction pulling at Lance’s face, and even Hunk kept getting distracted from his family to shoot looks Shiro’s way.

“You found yourself quite the family out here, didn’t you?” Val murmured, throwing an arm around Lance’s neck.

He chuckled, leaning against her. “Yeah. I got pretty damn lucky.”

The stillness lasted two more seconds, and then an alarm split the air, lights flashing overhead as Allura’s voice came on the PA. Shiro was on his feet in a heartbeat, his smile gone, his hand going for the weapons at his side.

“Paladins!” Allura cried. “You’re needed on the bridge.”

There was a note of panic in her voice, and the paladins waited just long enough to trade worried looks before turning and sprinting for the door. Val charged after them before she could think better of it, twisting aside as Sebastian reached out to stop her.

 _What are you doing?_ she screamed at herself. _You’re not a paladin. Leave this to people who know what they’re doing!_

But she _couldn’t_. She pressed into the elevator with the others, making way as Pidge, Keith, and Akira crowded in beside her.

“Anyone know what this is about?” Pidge asked, brimming with nervous energy. “I thought we’d finished Vanda off.”

No one had an answer for them, but it was only a few more seconds before the door slid aside. The other paladins--Nyma, Shay, Allura, and Ryner--were already on the bridge, crowded around the viewscreen, where a new ship was visible halfway out of an enormous wormhole. Shiro’s breath hitched, and he reached out for Keith, whose ears pressed flat against his head.

“Reinforcements?” Lance asked, his voice shaking even as he tried to put on a brave face.

Keith shook his head. “That’s—Those aren’t ordinary reinforcements, Lance,” he said, looking to Allura and Coran, who seemed to already know what Keith was going to say. “That’s Zarkon’s flagship.”


	28. The Battle for Earth (Part One)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Thace found a research lab churning out deadly cybernetic monstrosities and blew it up. Knowing that it's only a matter of time before his act of rebellion is discovered, he returned to Prorok's warship, where several additional squads of the creatures are awaiting deployment, and prepared himself for one final stand.
> 
> Meanwhile on Earth, Hunk and Lance finally reunited with their families, and all the humans had a chance to catch up while the other paladins brought the rescued prisoners back to the castle-ship. It wasn't long, however, before Vanda realized what had happened. At Meri's suggestion, the paladins' families were brought to the castle-ship, where they gathered in the lounge with Zuza and a handful of the Galra kiddos to wait for news of the battle. The paladins destroyed Vanda's fleet easily, but before they could celebrate, Zarkon's own flagship arrived.

The comms station was dark at this hour, the light of the screen bright enough to sting Thace’s eyes. It had been a long time since he’d had to sneak around like this—mostly he just sent data off to the Accords using the automatic script saved to a data chip hidden beneath his claw, or passed the information to Dez and let her worry about relaying it to whoever might benefit from the knowledge.

But this was something he couldn’t risk routing through Dez. Thace’s exploits at the cybernetics lab hadn’t yet brought down the executioner’s axe, but he knew it was only a matter of time. If they hadn’t yet noticed that they were missing an entire research facility, it was only because Zarkon and Haggar both had their attention fixed on the Hovent Sector and the humans’ home planet.

Footsteps sounded outside the comms station door, and Thace tensed in a way he couldn’t remember tensing since Keena had first convinced him to join the Accords and put his life on the line. Invisible eyes made the back of his neck crawl, and his pulse beat strong in his temples. He didn’t stop typing, though. Didn’t dare. This message had to get through to the paladins. They had to know the first batch of cybernetic warriors were already on Earth, with more on the way if Thace failed to complete his mission. Or if Haggar had a second production lab hidden somewhere, which seemed entirely too likely.

The footsteps passed on, but Thace didn’t relax as he copied over the files he’d managed to steal pertaining to Project Robeast and associated research. He dumped everything into his transmission—dates, procedures, coordinates, prisoner logs. The chemical formula for synthetic Quintessence and the schematics for most standard cybernetic enhancements (though not, unfortunately, for the robeasts themselves.)

The Accords’ spymaster wouldn’t be happy with the unauthorized file transfer—even if he was sending it to the paladins of vrekking Voltron.

Well, so be it. She could take her issues up with his corpse if she liked. Every agent had to draw a line somewhere. Keena had taught him that. Everyone eventually came up against a fight that resonated in their soul. You could chase that fight, even if that meant burning yourself on the altar of Zarkon’s empire, or you could stand by. The Accords needed more agents who knew their duty, who stood back and let their soul be ripped apart for the sake of keeping their cover intact.

But the last person to choose to fight—the last person to choose that and to live, at any rate—had ended up appointed spymaster, the highest position in their order. It was hard to discipline others for making the same choice.

It was a painful wait for the files to upload, and for the program on Thace’s black data chip to wipe all trace of Thace’s presence from the system, but then it was done. The message was away. The paladins had their warning.

Thace glanced down at the body of the guard who had been on duty tonight—the only remaining evidence against him. There had been no option of luring the guard away, not with as long as this message had taken to send, and Thace couldn’t simply order him out of the room. His virus would delay discovery, nothing more.

Thace closed his eyes, taking a moment to breathe as he checked that he still had the explosive discs hidden in his sleeves.

 _I have made a difference,_ he told himself, turning toward the door. _I have taken a stand. I have saved lives. The universe is a better place for my sacrifice._

The darkness and the peace of the comms station vanished behind him as he set out toward the docking bays at the belly of the ship, where four more cryo-vessels full of cybernetic warriors awaited deployment. He clasped his hands behind his waist, thumbing the hilt of his hidden dagger.

_I will see this task through. Whatever the cost._

* * *

As soon as Keith's words made it through the haze of shock, Lance turned and sprinted for the elevator to the Blue Lion’s hangar. _Zarkon’s flagship._

Shit.

He made it into the elevator and jammed the button for the hangar, and only then realized he was alone in the lift. Meri, Nyma, and Val stood on the bridge, all seemingly frozen. Meri stared at Lance in open longing, Nyma glared daggers at the viewscreen, and Val seemed determined to fade into the background.

Lance caught the elevator door as it started to close, frowning at all three of them. Across the room, the other paladins disappeared into their respective elevators and disappeared from sight. Akira stood, rigid, by the doors, gaping at the bridge displays and at the swarm of Galra fighters already leaving their bays on Zarkon’s ship to stream toward the castle-ship like a dozen hives' worth of angry hornets.

“What’s wrong?” Lance asked, glancing from Val to Meri, both of whom avoided his gaze.

“Take Nyma,” Meri said. “Val, too, if she’s up for it. I’ll stay here. Probably be more use--”

Nyma’s head whipped around, her headtails snapping at her shoulders. “Excuse me?” she hissed, sharp enough to draw the attention of everyone else on the bridge. Meri shot a self-conscious glance at Coran, then hunched her shoulders.

“Look, Blue and I haven’t even had a chance to reforge our bond. I can’t--”

“You realize you have more experience with the Blue Lion than _literally_ anyone in this room,” Nyma said. “Right?” She held up a hand before Meri could reply and turned to Val. “Four people in a one-man ship is overkill, even if that ship likes to adopt extra pilots. What do you say you and me go grab the _Harbinger?_ I’m sure we can take out a handful of fighters while the big cats go for the real prize.”

Val’s eyes darted toward Lance, but she straightened up, nodding.

Lance opened his mouth to protest, then shut it. The _Harbinger_ wasn’t exactly the safest vessel in the system right now—but was _anywhere_ really safe? Nyma did have a point, after all. Why stick three people in Blue on the off-chance they all figured out how to sync up at once— _assuming_ it was even possible with four people? (It had to be possible, Lance thought, or why would Blue have done it?)

“Okay,” he said, nodding to Nyma and forcing a smile for Val. “Take care of each other. Le—Meri?”

Meri was still staring at Nyma and Val, who turned and headed for the door. For just an instant, Lance thought he saw fear on Meri’s face. It was strange—she didn’t look very much like the Lena who had babysat him, but there was enough of a resemblance for it to seem jarring to catch her looking so uncertain. Lena had always been the wise, kind, experienced adult-like figure in the room.

He supposed he really had grown up if he could look at Meri and see someone almost as young and scared as he was.

Their eyes met, and Meri visibly gathered herself. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She joined him in the elevator, and they endured the ride down to Blue’s hangar in awkward silence. Meri had found a flight suit somewhere, a white and blue and orange armored suit that reminded Lance of a blend of Coran’s uniform and the paladin armor.

“So...” Lance rocked up on his toes as the floors whipped past with hardly a whisper of machinery. “You wanna fly, or…?”

Meri glanced at him, one hand coming up to fidget with her hair. “I—no. No. You should—You’re the one who’s...”

She trailed off, and Lance remembered his conversation with Allura just a few days ago. She’d said Meri was insecure in her bond. That Meri had never believed she was really a paladin. Lance’s throat closed up, and he ached to reassure her somehow. He should have been able to, but talking to Meri was not the same as talking to Lena. He’d known her all his life, and yet he barely knew her at all.

Before Lance could figure out what to say, the elevator arrived at the bottom floor and, sighing, he shoved his helmet on his head and took off toward Blue, smiling as she purred a welcome that rattled the doors and left Lance’s feet tingling. He glanced over his shoulder to see that the sound had startled a smile out of Meri.

Leaving her to gather her composure and regain some semblance of calm, Lance raced up the ramp and settled himself at the controls. Meri joined him a moment later, setting one hand on the back of his seat, and all of a sudden Lance was back at the Garrison, flying the simulator while the instructors looked over his shoulder, ready to point out everything he’d done wrong.

Blue sent him a sensation of calm—sent it to both of them, maybe, because Meri let out a shaky laugh as Lance shook the tension from his arms.

“Okay,” she said, though Lance wasn't sure who she was talking to. “Okay.”

Lance looked up at her, offered a smile, then turned Blue toward the door. “Let’s do this.”

* * *

“Alright, everyone, fan out.” Takashi’s voice sounded oddly hollow over the radio, and harsher than Akira had ever heard it. He’d seen Takashi in command roles before, but only ever at the Garrison academy, when the top fighter squads held open sim runs—part competition among themselves, part instruction for the younger cadets. And of course Iverson-approved because it rubbed in the cargo pilots’ faces just how inferior they were.

Takashi was now and had always been level-headed when others looked to him for leadership, but the Takashi of their younger years had been kind, patient. Gentle, even. This man was someone else altogether. A man keeping a tight reign on his fear and channeling his urgency into action. “Keith, Matt, take the outer flank. Don’t let any of them through toward Earth. Everyone else, split up, but keep your eyes open. It’s too easy for a single lion to get overwhelmed. Reach out if you need backup. Coran?”

“All weapons online,” Coran said. “We’ll take out as many of the big ones as we can.”

“Copy that.”

The lasers were already flying fast and thick, turning the backdrop of stars to a web of blue and white streaks. The Black Lion, which had seemed so grand and imposing when it towered over the motel like some kind of elder beast, now looked like a housefly buzzing around the behemoth that was Zarkon’s flagship.

 _This_ was what Takashi had been facing all this time? What _Pidge_ had been facing?

Akira felt sick as he stared out over the battle. He was too numb to figure out what, if anything, he could do to help. The bridge was a flurry of activity, aliens shouting and rushing around. There were only four of them, including Coran, but they seemed to be doing the work of at least a dozen. And one of them was a child even younger than Pidge.

When the hell had the universe gone off the rails?

Coran opened a new window on his display screen—a video chat, it seemed, with an unfamiliar alien’s face displayed within.

“Commander Anamuri,” Coran said, breathless. Lance yelled at someone to deal with an advancing gunship, and Coran ordered one of the purple—Galra?--crew members to redirect the main laser. Then he flashed a weak smile at the alien called Anamuri. “I hope I haven’t caught you at a bad time.”

Anamuri’s green eyes narrowed. “What’s the situation?”

Coran chuckled, perhaps at the way Anamuri decapitated his efforts at small-talk. “Earth,” he said. “The humans’ homeworld. It’s under attack. Zarkon is here.”

Anamuri muttered something that sounded like a curse. “You can’t hope to take him in a straight fight, even with Voltron.”

Beyond the windshield, the Yellow Lion took the brunt of a massive laser blast, shielding Green. Someone screamed. Several others roared in a tangle of voices too think to interpret. Akira’s knees shook.

“No,” Coran said. “But even if I didn’t know Zarkon meant to sentence the people of this world to an unthinkable fate, the paladins would never back down from this fight.” He paused, adjusting something on another screen, and glanced back at Anamuri. “I know this is asking a lot of you.”

Anamuri held up a stumpy hand that was two-thirds blunt, curving claw. “Voltron has been there in our moments of greatest need. I don’t know that our meager strength is sufficient repayment, but we will stand with you.”

Coran visibly relaxed, his eyes fluttering closed for the space of a heartbeat before he got back to work. “Thank you.” He ended the call as Anamuri began shouting orders, then returned his attention to the fight. The Black Lion--Takashi's lion--plunged into a thick tangle of enemy ships, the light around it warping. The ships' trajectories faltered, their engines flaring bright as they were drawn in closer to the lion, which turned suddenly, slashing at the nearest ships with a massive blade held in...well, it's _mouth_. It pivoted, then unleashed a column of light that tore through most of the remaining ships in the area. Takashi was away before the survivors could recover.

Akira shook himself as his brother's lion disappeared into the chaos. It wasn’t doing anyone any good to have him standing around gawking like a kid on the first day of flight school—open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and too awed to sit his ass down at the controls.

“Where do you need me?” Akira asked, stepping toward Coran.

The man turned, sized him up, then nodded toward the ring of padded chairs standing between them. Each of the five stations had a dashboard and a holographic monitor; the younger Altean crew member sat in the seat immediately to Akira’s right.

“The paladin stations can access the security drones,” Coran said. “You can take manual control of one, or deploy several and assign them targets. Computer, bring up the control scheme for him, would you?”

Akira raised an eyebrow, but took a seat just ahead of the alien kid. Akira’s screen lit up as soon as he sat down, and a yoke not entirely unlike the ones in Earth ships rose from the console. Akira scanned the schematics displayed on his screen, then selected semi-automatic. It felt a little like a video game, in all honesty--positioning his half a dozen drones and telling them where to shoot.

Like a video game, except the cost of losing this battle was far higher than wasted time.

He’d barely settled into the rhythm of battle, riding out the aftershocks of an enemy laser that splashed across the castle’s shields, when the doors hissed open behind him.

“What’s going on?” Karen demanded. “Where are my kids? I thought the battle was over.”

Akira glanced over his shoulder to see Eli standing in the door beside Karen, looking vaguely nauseous as he stared out at the battle around them.

“Reinforcements,” Coran said tersely. “We need the paladins to drive them off.”

Akira might have imagined the emphasis Coran put on the word _paladins—_ a sharp contrast to Karen's words--but then again, he might not have. Karen’s breath hissed through her teeth, drawing Coran’s gaze. He didn’t look nearly as wary of getting on Karen Holt’s bad side as someone with more intimate knowledge of the woman might have, and Akira wondered whether he should warn Coran what he was up against.

Before Karen could tear into him, however, the Green Lion took a bad hit and tumbled across the battlefield, shield flashing white as Pidge’s angry curses filled the air. Karen let out a small, pained noise, and rushed toward Coran, stumbling on the edge of the platform on which he stood.

“Get them out of there,” she whispered. When Coran didn’t answer, she tore her eyes from the battle. “Get them _out_.” She spun toward Akira. “Can they hear me? Pidge?”

Her voice raised toward a shout, and Coran hastily reached out to press a button on his screen. The voices of the paladins cut out abruptly, and Coran turned toward Karen.

“I see how this might be upsetting to you,” he began.

Karen cut him off before he finished the thought. " _Upsetting?_ " If it was possible to eviscerate someone with a glare, Akira didn’t doubt Karen would have managed it now. “Pidge is _fourteen years old._ There is no reason they should be out there in that goddamn war zone.”

Coran pursed his lips. “They are young,” Coran said. “And in any other circumstances, they wouldn’t have even been considered for the paladin bond. But the Green Lion chose them, and they are _exceptionally_ skilled at what they do. They have saved lives—this team has saved entire _planets_. When you’re up against a man who has crushed civilizations without blinking, you cannot afford to turn down an offer of aid, no matter who is making it.”

Karen was still fuming, but Akira had latched onto something in Coran’s rant. Something that sounded at once impossible and practically inevitable given the level of sheer sci fi bullshit going on all around him. “Did you say… the lion chose them? As in the ship?”

Coran’s lips quirked upward. “The Voltron Lions are quite particular about their pilots. Believe me, Mrs. Holt. There is very little I wouldn’t give to take your child’s place out there, but I _can’t._ So I’ll go on doing what I can to bring them back in one piece. You can help by not distracting them in the middle of the biggest battle this system has seen in ten thousand years.”

Karen’s mouth hung open as Coran turned back to his battle, barking new orders to his crew and pointedly ignoring Karen's presence. Eli stepped up behind her, offering cautious sympathy as the audio came back on—just in time for Hunk to shout in alarm and Lance to scream his name. Eli’s hand’s tightened on Karen’s shoulders, and she tore her gaze away from Coran to look at Eli.

Feeling like he was intruding, Akira returned his gaze to his own battle, deploying another half-dozen drones as two of his were shot down. He hoped the castle didn’t have a limited stockpile of these things.

A chime from up ahead attracted Akira’s attention—all the more so when Coran let out a sound of dismay.

“What was that?” Hunk asked, his voice edged with fear. “That wasn’t a good noise. Coran? What’s happening?”

“Message from the Accords,” Coran said. “Give me a tick to corroborate.”

Matt swore softly. “I hope they aren’t expecting our help right now.”

“Maybe they’re offering to send backup,” Lance said, forcing cheer. Meri’s voice came a second later, more distant, asking, _The Accords?_ Lance blew out a long breath. “Resistance group. We think maybe Galra, maybe Altean, maybe both? I dunno. It’s complicated.”

Coran called up a rapid sequence of images on his display, flicking windows aside as he scanned through them. His expression grew more grin with each successive readout. “Quiznak,” he finally muttered.

“That doesn’t sound promising,” Val said.

“It’s not.” Coran lifted a hand to his forehead, rubbing between his eyebrows. “The Accords just sent word of cybernetic warriors stationed on Earth.”

“Those things at the Garrison?” Takashi asked. “We already dealt with them.”

“You dealt with _some_ of them,” Coran said. “BLIP-tech shows a small cluster of augmented creatures—variety of species, heavily weighted toward Galra—in the desert just outside the city--Carlsbad, you called it? They’re on the move.”

The words shattered Akira’s attention, and he abandoned his drones to gape at Coran. The monsters from the Garrison—the ones who had nearly won a four-on-one fight. There were _more_?

An alert flashed red on the screen just before something tore a small, violet hole in space. A ship emerged, sleeker and shinier than the ships already engaged with the lions. It glinted in the light of the distant sun as it skimmed past the bulk of the battle on a collision-course with Earth.

“What’s _that_?” Lance squawked.

Coran ran another scan, then cursed again—more elaborately this time. “It has the same signature as those creatures.”

“More?” said a voice Akira didn’t recognize—pitched high in either fear or youth or, hell, maybe that was just a species thing. Akira wasn't sure he could make any assumptions right now.

Coran nodded, though Akira couldn't see any video chat windows at his station to suggest the paladins could see him. “I’m afraid so. The message from the Accords indicates these creatures are programmed for indiscriminate slaughter—and the shuttle’s nav systems automatically seek out areas of high population density.”

There was silence over the radio for the space of several seconds. Even the other aliens on the bridge paused to shoot pained looks toward Coran, who stood with head bowed, hands clenching the pedestals on either side of him so tightly Akira half expected their glass domes to shatter.

Finally, Takashi spoke up. “We’re going to have to split up.”

* * *

Shiro was already adjusting course as he spoke, letting Allura take over the explanation of the plan as he rushed after the Galra shuttle. It was small, as troop shuttles went—perhaps fifty feet long and half as wide—but with as fast as it was moving, it was going to cause a massive shockwave even before it impacted. _If_ it even slowed enough not to simply burn a crater in the heart of a city.

“We’ll take care of the new arrival,” Allura said. Shiro gave the Black Lion a new burst of speed as the shuttle hit the atmosphere, lighting up with a red-orange corona as it hurtled toward the surface. Shiro itched to blow the ship out of the sky, but the risk of collateral damage was too great. They couldn't go raining hunks of metal down across inhabited areas. Instead, he activated Black’s tractor beam, drawing the shuttle back toward him as he neared.

The beam slowed the shuttle’s descent, but it was moving too fast, and they were already too near the surface, and Black was dragged along behind the shuttle, her engines straining with the effort of slowing their momentum. The corona dimmed. Their speed dropped. Shiro only hoped it was enough to spare the people of whatever city the shuttle had been aiming for.

Then they crashed down into water, a tangle of metal and sound as the world turned upside down. The Black Lion regained her feet quickly, and Shiro shook his head, reaching back to steady Allura, who had fallen against his seat. Black’s internal stabilizers had spared them the worst of the impact--had saved Allura's life, and probably Shiro's as well--but there was no ignoring a collision like that altogether.

Black’s head broke the surface as she stood, water flowing off her, and Shiro found himself in the middle of a small bay looking out on a city skyline. It was dusk here, the city lights ablaze, reflecting off the choppy water like a thousand multi-hued specters. The city seemed only vaguely familiar, and Shiro couldn’t say whether that was because he’d visited it when he was younger, or if it was just the way all Earth cities had a kind of cohesion to them—all glass and steel and neon lights and skyscrapers clawing at the heavens.

“They’re on the move,” Allura said, pointing past Shiro to the hull of the Galra ship, which was visible just above the surface some distance away. Small figures, hardly visible in the gloom, scuttled across the hull and waded through the water toward the shoreline.

Shiro swore, undoing his restraints. “We have to go after them. Black’s lasers are too powerful to use this close to the city.”

Allura nodded and Black, seeming to understand Shiro’s worry, inched closer to shore as Shiro headed for the exit.

Slowly, he remembered the others. The mental link had dissolved when Allura lost her hold on the twin pedestals, and he only now began to process the voices coming over the comms.

“You’re in Mumbai,” Meri said, her voice muffled. Something metallic clunked, drowning out her next words.

Lance let out a confused noise. “What are you doing?”

“The lions used to have gliders stored in the cockpits for emergencies. You didn’t pull them out, did you?”

Allura froze beside Shiro, her eyes going wide. “You’re not serious.”

Meri laughed. “Rarely,” she said. “Ah-hah! Alright, you two. I’m on my way down.”

“No.” Allura surged ahead as the Black Lion opened her mouth, extending her ramp toward a stretch of broken rock. Water streamed down the uneven slope toward the bay and puddled on the broad street that skirted the edge of the bay. Some of the cars had been pushed back by the wave kicked up by the landing, and they now sat, stunned, against concrete barricades or turned around on the sidewalk beyond. Others had stopped where they were, drivers climbing out to gape at the Black Lion. Cameras flashed and voices whispered in awe and terror.

The sound of screams stopped Shiro from wondering too long how he was supposed to explain this to the spectators—or how he could convince them to take cover.

He spun, and found the cybernetic creatures coming ashore a few hundred feet away. Shiro was running by the time the first creature took a swing at a nearby civilian, and he snapped his pistol up. firing twice. The laser ignited the twilight with a blinding light and jolted the crowd into flight, the sound of their footsteps like thunder in Shiro's ears as he closed the distance to the Galra monstrosities.

“You need help,” Meri said firmly. “I’m coming.”

Shiro swore, firing again at the advancing creatures, then spinning, bringing his dagger up in his left hand and slamming it into the first creature’s chest.

The creature hardly slowed, and Shiro barely managed to wrench his blade free in time to dodge the creature’s retaliation.

“Fine,” he said, ducking another creature’s swing. “Lance, grab Pidge and Hunk and deal with the creatures in Carlsbad.” Half-formed plans and strings of advice pressed at his mind, but the other creatures had gained the shore now. Shiro was surrounded, Allura spinning and snarling just outside his reach, and there was no time to talk the others through their fight. He breathed deeply, reminding himself that they’d done just fine without him before. “Lance, you have the command. Good luck.”

* * *

_Command._

An icy thrill shot through Lance at Shiro’s words. It was part terror, part determination, part Blue’s pride in him (and perhaps a bit of his own pride, trickling beneath the surface.) He tried to tell himself he’d done this before, but it didn’t help much with the nerves.

Still, he swallowed, unleashed a blast of ice to freeze the Galra fighters around him, then turned and darted to where the Yellow and Green Lions were fighting in tandem. The wreckage of an assault ship drifted around them, and more than a few fighters self-destructed on its pieces. The _Harbinger_ sailed overhead, distracting one chunk of enemy ships; Green spat lightning in the opposite direction; and Yellow curled protectively around the two tiny, armored forms that came shooting out into open space.

Lance scooped them up as gently as he could, then wheeled around and headed for the surface, his heart pounding. He checked the BLIP-tech display, silently asking Blue to filter out human signatures, and felt his heart drop. The creatures must have come from the Garrison itself, or somewhere nearby; they were still out in the middle of the desert, racing toward the city.

Other non-human vital signatures remained at the Garrison, and they showed no signs of leaving.

"Civilians first," Lance said as Hunk and Pidge appeared on either side of him, both leaning forward to get a look at the display. Hunk let out a sound of dismay, and Pidge cursed under their breath. "I’m going to try to head them off before they get too close to the city,” Lance went on. “Blue’s lasers are way stronger than our bayards, so she should be able to take them out as long as we’re out there in the open.”

Pidge stared at the BLIP-tech readout a moment longer, then straightened, flashing a smile. “And if that doesn’t work, you can always just squish them. Like bugs. Big, huge, squishy bugs.”

Hunk groaned. “Bad mental image, Pidge,” he whined. Pidge grinned sheepishly.

“It’s a good plan,” they said after a moment, their voice low. Lance shot a look their way, wondering if his nerves were that obvious, but they just put a finger on the side of his helmet and turned his face back toward the viewscreen. “Really. You’ve got this.”

Hunk squeezed Lance’s shoulder in agreement, and Lance took a deep breath. “You’re right.” He shook out his hands and leaned forward, shoving his doubts aside and focusing on what had to be done. “This is gonna be a piece of cake.”

Blue plowed through a lone, fluffy cloud, vapor swirling behind her as the desert opened up beneath them. Carlsbad was visible in the distance, and the highway cut a thin, dark line almost directly below. Lance pulled them southward toward the area where Blue had located the cybernetic creatures. Looking through Blue’s eyes, he could just pick them out—eight creatures of varying sizes, all heavily armored, loping along the hard-packed earth toward the city now less than a mile away.

 _I don’t think so._ Lance opened fire, his first barrage catching three of the creatures before they realized they were under attack. The creatures went down, skidding across the ground and lying still. Lance kept them in view as he swung around, spraying the ground with ice in a wide radius that caught most of the pack, slowing them. Blue brought her tail laser around, searing a line across the ground and consuming three more creatures in blinding white light. The last two charged ahead, their gaits opening up into a desperate sprint rather than the easy pace they’d set before.

Blue dropped to the ground, the thunder of her paws roaring in Lance’s ears as he chased down the two runaways. He couldn’t possibly have felt the crunch of bones and armor under Blue’s massive paws, but he shuddered anyway as Hunk gave a miserable moan.

“Is it over?”

Lance pulled on the controls, spinning Blue around. She dug her claws in, skidding to a stop. Eight charred and broken corpses dotted the desert. “I… I think so.”

“I’ve got the cameras at the Garrison,” Pidge said. Lance whipped his head around, feeling Hunk do the same beside him. Pidge glanced up from the holographic screen projected from their gauntlet, then did a double-take as they realized Lance and Hunk were staring at them—in Lance’s case, at least—with open bafflement. “What?” Pidge pouted. “You think _Iverson’s_ on the same level as the Galra? Please.”

Lance opened his mouth to comment on that, then thought better of it. He urged Blue into the air and directed her toward the Garrison complex. “How’s it look?”

“Galra,” they said. “I mean, like, actual Galra, plus sentries, and… looks like two more of those cyborg things. I checked the data Ryner pulled from the prison ship, and I’m pretty sure that’s Commander Vanda down there.”

“What?” Lance growled. “I thought we took her out.” But his mind was already skimming ahead. Vanda herself had destroyed the prison ship, blowing it to ash before the paladins could finish the deed. "Damnit," he muttered. "That was just a distraction, wasn't it?"

Pidge nodded. “I'm guessing she set the self-destruct with a delay and escaped in a pod just before the ship blew. She’s only got about a dozen Galra with her—but some of the humans are joining her ranks. I don’t want to think about what’s going to happen when they start running into people who aren’t on board with Iverson’s plan to hand the planet over to hostile aliens.”

Lance grimaced, dark visions flashing through his head. "No," he said. "No way in hell." Vanda had done enough damage already; he wasn’t going to let her take the Garrison and all its weaponry and have her way. “We’ll have to do this part on foot.” The Garrison appeared in the distance, a smudge of low, colorless buildings and a sparkle of chain-link fence. Lance leaned on the throttle, his jaw set. “Get ready.”

* * *

“We need to do something.”

Karen heard her own voice, but it sounded like a stranger speaking. A small, frail stranger too far out of her depth to have half an inkling how to respond to any of this.

Eli was still standing beside her, looking close to fainting as the children—paladins— _children_ called out status updates and demands for backup. Shiro and Allura had met up with Meri down in Mumbai, and they were making steady progress through the alien monstrosities—steady, but not quick. Civilians were fleeing the battle, but the monsters were fast. Faster than unsuspecting humans, it seemed. Pidge and their friends had reported that they were at the Garrison just a few moments ago, and then had dropped out of the conversation. Matt was snarling and spitting like an angry cat as his ship flashed this way and that through the chaos, raining fire and light down on the enemy.

Karen wondered for the first time whether Coran might truly understand her children better than she herself did. Seeing them out in this terrified her, but she couldn't deny it. They knew what they were doing. They weren’t panicking—none of them. Not even Hunk, who showed the tension most plainly in his voice.

They weren’t new to battle.

The realization broke her heart, but she’d stopped demanding Coran return her children to the castle some time ago. She doubted any of the paladins would have listened to the order, anyway.

Still, she couldn’t help being glad she and Eli had convinced the Mendozas and Hunk’s mothers to stay in the lounge some dozen floors below. Karen half wished she’d stayed down there herself. Even Akira, who was still hunched over a display near Coran, looked shaken, his face ashen, his hands trembling as he swiped strange icons on the screen.

Karen’s hands curled into fists, and she strode toward the computer station dead ahead, the one at the center of the ring Akira and the young alien boy occupied. “Can we contact the surface with this?”

Coran glanced at her, brow furrowed. "What would you want to do something like that for?"

"Reinforcements," Karen said, hurrying on before Coran could say what he so obviously wanted to. "I know--I _know_ we have nothing even close to this level. But we do _have_ military units trained for..." She faltered, staring out again at the chaos. She doubted any government had been anticipating something like this, but as technology improved and the world's superpowers started sending more and more ships into space, people started anticipating wars fought high above the Earth's surface. Earth might not have space-faring armadas like these aliens did, but it was better than no aid at all. "I'm going to get my children whatever support I can," she said, straining to keep her voice level. "Now can this ship make phone calls or not?"

Coran stared at her a moment longer, then turned to an empty section of screen to his left. “Computer, scan local communication channels.” A small window popped up near his shoulder, text scrolling across it for a few seconds before a dialogue box popped up. Coran tapped it with one fingertip, then flashed a thumbs-up in Karen’s direction. “The computer has isolated your primitive comm networks. You should be able to connect to them no problem.”

“Great.” Karen stared blankly at the screen in front of her. Words that had seemed, at first glance, to be written in unfamiliar characters now stared up at her in plain English, which might have unnerved her if a dozen other things hadn’t already made a better effort. She lifted one hand, then paused. “Who the hell do we even go to about this? The media? The government?”

“Both,” Eli said, claiming the seat behind her and to her left. “Are there cameras up here? Can we stream footage of this invasion? Cause I mean, no one’s going to listen if we just call them up and say aliens are attacking the Earth.”

Karen grimaced. “And even if they listen, how much are they going to be able to do?” Again, the scale of this situation made itself known, and for a moment Karen wondered whether there was really any point in trying. The Garrison was compromised, thanks to Iverson, and it had managed most of the United States’ space-worthy combat craft. The Air Force had a small contingent—but it wasn’t as though Karen could just call them up and order their ships into the air.

But she had to try. She had friends, colleagues, old classmates and professors, professional acquaintances of all stripes who had moved on from private practice. Some were politicians now, or knew politicians. If she called enough of them, maybe the message would start getting through. Maybe someone would start getting ships in the air.

"You worry about getting word to the right people," Eli said as Coran called out to someone named Ryner, asking whether Pidge had any programs saved to the castle's mainframe that could help. Karen glanced behind her and met Eli's eyes. "I'll make sure they're ready to listen."

* * *

One of the ships had already launched by the time Thace reached the hangar where the cybernetic warriors were stored. He swore softly when he saw the empty space, then prayed the paladins had heeded his warning, that it had prepared them enough for them to deal with another contingent. He assumed that was where the shuttle had gone—there was no one else in the universe Zarkon wanted gone quite so desperately as he wanted the paladins gone. One day, perhaps, these creatures would be unleashed on all the small rebellions that had been allowed to fester for one reason or another, but not now. Not when they were in such limited supply.

At any rate, there was nothing Thace could do about the missing ship now. Three more ships still waited before him, each perfectly deadly in its own right.

He’d left three more dead bodies behind him on his way, along with two ruined sentries, and the countdown already pounded in his blood. How long before one of the bodies was discovered? How much longer until they figured out where Thace had gone?

No time to waste.

Thace strode across the hangar, pulling out his explosives. A single disc should be enough to destroy each shuttle, but he’d seen the metrics on these creatures’ durability and capacity for repair. He had to destroy them utterly, or Haggar would simply patch them up with more cybernetic enhancements and send them out even stronger than before.

Pausing outside the first shuttle, Thace pressed one disc to the casing over the main engines, then activated the ramp and placed two more inside, spaced evenly along the row of cryo chambers that held the creatures. Thace was not exceptionally short for a Galra, though his family had more slender frames than was typical. Even so, these creatures towered over him, some by several heads, and all had bulky, broad-shouldered frames—even those he recognized as having come from smaller species.

There were few of these, as the test subjects had come primarily from the various Arenas dotting the empire. Galra made up the single largest group, followed by a scaled, draconic species called Helliofals. Two Balmerans, an Olkari, and a Raus rounded out the dozen.

Thace allowed himself only a moment to mourn these victims, as he’d mourned the test subjects in the lab at Antimar—not for the blood they left on his hands, but as victims who had passed quietly and without fanfare.

Then he ducked out of the ship and headed to the neighboring vessel, where he repeated the process. The ship’s alarms began to blare as he headed inside to set the second and third charges, and Thace mentally accelerated his countdown. He didn’t have long before someone came to check this hangar, but--

Laserfire greeted Thace at the mouth of the ramp and he swore, ducking back inside.

“Vrekt,” he hissed. Had word of Antimar already reached the higher-ups? Did they already know what Thace intended? He checked himself, smiling wryly. Maybe he’d just gotten unlucky. Anyone who knew what was stored down here would surely hasten to check on the contents of the shuttles—especially since Thace’s trail of destruction had led this way.

Thace held his four remaining explosives in the palm of his hand, weighing his options. The shuttles were parked close enough together that an explosion might tear apart the one he hadn’t had time to rig with explosives, but he’d rather not risk it.

Besides, there was no reason not to go for the longshot. If he died, the ships would blow anyway.

 _I have made a difference,_ Thace recited, breathing in and releasing his regrets on the exhale.

He separated one charge from the rest and lobbed it down the ramp toward the guards still firing at him, smiling as they shouted an alarm, their lasers petering out as they scrambled for cover.

_I have taken a stand._

Hardly waiting for the danger to pass, Thace threw himself down the ramp and sprinted forward, drawing his dagger and quickly pressing the three remaining charges to the blade. He was sad to see the blade destroyed, but it was dangerous to let the knives fall into Imperial hands. Many were lost with the bodies of fallen agents, most others recovered before they could be passed along. But at least one had already been found by one of Zarkon’s loyal men. Each additional blade recovered by the Empire increased the odds of Zarkon figuring out the connection and ordering a search of the entire army.

_I have saved lives._

Thace turned and flung his dagger toward the third shuttle. A laser caught him in the shoulder as he released, throwing off his aim just slightly. The dagger’s tip sunk into the metal hull several feet in front of the engine casing--but it stuck, which was going to have to be good enough.

_The universe is a better place for my sacrifice._

Thace didn’t wait for the guards to end him. They were still clustered around the charge he’d lobbed at them, evidently having decided it was a simple distraction.

Thace almost felt sorry for them.

He pressed the detonator as he dove for cover, his shoulder screaming. There was a roaring behind him, then a sudden, chilling silence. Thace only processed the roiling, white-hot light enveloping him when his vision faded to black, a chill stealing over him. The room spun.

He woke an instant later—or maybe an eternity—on the floor of the burned-out hangar. Frost gilded his scorched armor, and the pain of half-numbed burns competed for his attention with cold in his extremities so sharp it felt like live coals. He blinked a few times, trying to clear the shadows from his eyes, but the right side of his vision remained dim.

Scrambling to his feet, Thace surveyed the damage. All three shuttles were gone—as was nearly half of the hangar; all that remained was a ragged hole in the side of the ship. The steel canisters he’d thrown himself behind must have shielded him from the worst of the blast—or maybe it was that the breach had put out the fires before he was consumed. Certainly the other soldiers were nowhere to be seen—lost to the vacuum that had made Thace pass out?

Regardless, the ship’s artificial atmosphere had sealed the breach, leaving Thace alone in the ruins of the hangar.

Alive.

Thace hadn’t honestly planned on that possibility, and he found himself floundering, his head pounding, his vision swaying like a ship without stabilizers. His side ached and his toes burned, and when he breathed in his throat felt raw. He coughed, and was surprised not to see blood on his hand when he pulled it away.

_Move._

Keena’s voice, sharp and practical as always. She’d always been better at improvising than Thace was. He listened to her now, sluggish thoughts starting to fall into line.

He was alive. That meant there was still a chance to get out of here. Perhaps he could retire to New Altea after this. They had to give him a pension after he’d been blown up for the cause, didn’t they?

Thace staggered to the door and pressed a shaking hand to the controls. He had to try twice, his distorted vision making it difficult to gauge the distance between him and the control pad. But he managed eventually, and the door hissed open.

A dozen guards waited on the other side, Dez at their head. She seemed surprised to see him standing there, and Thace couldn’t say he blamed her. He was surprised, too.

 _Internal Security,_ Thace thought, dizzy. He smiled weakly as Dez sucked in a sharp breath, and wished he could apologize to her. But protocol was protocol, after all. Thace’s cover was blown, and there were witnesses. Dez couldn’t offer him aid without putting herself at risk.

At least she would make the end quick.

He closed his eyes, waiting for Dez’s laser to tear through his heart...but it didn’t come.

“Thace?” Dez’s voice was ragged, a note of hurt swirling just below the surface. “ _You_ did this?”

Thace had to hand it to her: she pulled off shock and betrayal surprisingly well—though he supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d been an agent of the Accords even longer than Thace. He opened his eyes to study her, trying to figure out what her game was.

She had her gun out, its barrel pointed at his face, but she hadn’t fired yet.

She hadn’t fired yet.

Thace’s heart began to pound. He knew Dez, and he knew she knew protocol. As soon as capture became inevitable, she should have killed him. The fact that she hadn’t…

It meant she still thought there was a chance for him to escape.

Thace was flattered she thought so highly of him. Truly he was. But he was aching, and he was tired, and he still couldn’t see right out of one eye, and though he still had his sword he didn’t trust himself to last through even a brief skirmish.

But Dez thought he had a chance. He wondered, dizzily, whether she knew something he did not.

Thace raised his head, smiling in a way that bared his fangs, and gathered himself to run. “Sorry, Nadezda,” he purred. “Nothing personal.” He lunged on the last word—but not toward Dez. A younger officer, wide-eyed and slack-jawed stood at the edge of the group. Thace charged toward him, activating his sword as he went. A laser fizzled against his armor, but Thace didn’t slow. He ran the officer through, spun, and flung his body at the others who had moved to apprehend him.

Without missing a beat, Thace completed his spin and took off at a sprint, his whole being fixated on the shuttle bay waiting for him just down the corridor.

* * *

Lance set the Blue Lion down directly on top of the flower beds that surround the Garrison administrative building and the chained-up visitor parking lot. Honestly, he would have preferred to crush the building itself, but there were probably people inside—people who might not be evil douchebags.

So he settled for crushing a few shrubs and the extensive sprinkler system that kept them alive in the middle of the desert because, honestly, fuck the Garrison.

There was a crowd gathering in the Green—the open space between the academic buildings and the dorms that was neither green nor particularly private, a fact that was currently biting Vanda in the ass. She and her dozen remaining soldiers stood in the center of the space, guns at the ready, Vanda shouting orders at Galra and humans alike as the three paladins came charging in.

Lance summoned his shield, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Hunk and Pidge as the lasers flashed white against the energy barriers.

Beyond the Galra forces, Lance could see a building swarm of cadets pressing against a line of faculty who were trying valiantly to hold them back.

“Paladins,” Vanda growled. “How kind of you to deliver yourself to me.”

“Deliver ourselves?” Lance lowered his shield in indignation, then yelped as the Galra all redirected fire on him. “Look, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, lady, but I promise we aren’t here to throw ourselves on your mercy.”

Vanda’s lip curled back, emphasizing a dark patch on her scaly cheek—a bruise? Lance allowed himself a fleeting smile as he wondered where it had come from. Maybe she’d tripped and bashed her face on the floor in her panicked flight from her doomed prison ship. She opened her mouth, probably ready to spew some lame Galran insults at him.

The cadets were faster.

“Lance?”

There was no telling who said it first, but the question was quickly taken up by the rest of the cadets. The clamor only grew louder as they recognized Hunk and Pidge. Shock turned to confusion, and Lance caught snatches of _they said you died!_ and something about a training accident and one particularly poignant, “What the actual fuck?”

The currents in the air shifted, confusion becoming anger, and somebody hurled a rock at the Galra soldiers. It was a small rock, not even big enough to hurt someone with full body armor, but the target spun, dropping the barrel of her weapon toward the crowd of cadets.

"Hey!" Lance roared, firing his rifle into the air. The Galra gave a start and spun back toward him, her eyes wide. "Don't forget who it is you're fighting, Vanda. Leave the other humans out of this." He scanned the cluster of human soldiers intermingled with the Galra until he found the person with the highest rank—Colonel Hawes. Lance’s stomach twisted as he recognized the man. He’d looked up to Hawes, once upon a time. “You don’t want to do this. Do you have any idea what they’re after?”

Hawes didn’t flinch, unlike the two men standing beside him. “We have an alliance,” he said. “That’s all I need to know.”

“An alliance, huh?” Hunk snorted. “What sort of terms do you think are written into that alliance? You do Zarkon's dirty work for him and in exchange maybe instead of killing you and your families he only ships you off to an inhospitable rock for the rest of your life?”

Pidge stood up suddenly straighter, as though they'd just been zapped by their own bayard. Lance shot a look their way just in time to see them grin and duck behind Hunk, typing furiously on the keyboard embedded in their armor.

_What are you up to now?_

“They’re murderers,” Hunk went on, his voice getting harder with every word. The cadets had gone quiet, their eyes riveted to the showdown, the faculty guarding them looking incredibly nervous.

Lance pounced on the stunned silence, his eyes sliding to Vanda. She hadn't yet given the order to attack, which meant--hopefully--that Lance could buy Pidge the time they needed to put their plan into motion. “They kidnap people who get in the way. Ship them off to research labs and use them as fuel for their ships. Maybe that was a fair price to pay for a top spot in the pecking order as far as Iverson was concerned, but if you ask me that’s bullshit.”

With a soft cry of triumph, Pidge emerged from Hunk’s shadow, tapping their gauntlet so their holodisplay swelled to a hundred times its usual size. They had a news report streaming—the bold text beneath the video proclaiming _Breaking News: Aliens Attack Mumbai_.

“We still have very little information regarding the ongoing events in Mumbai, or on the strange broadcast that took over our network a few minutes ago, claiming this all to be the act of an aggressive alien race called the Galra,” the newscaster was saying, her voice shaky like—well, like she was being asked to report on an actual alien invasion. Pidge caught Lance's eyes and mouthed,  _Eli_ , grinning devilishly. “Emergency responders are still trying to get to the victims trapped by flooding from the crafts’ initial landing in Mahim Bay.”

The shot changed from a long view of choppy water and empty streets to a close-up on the fighting. Lance could only just make out Shiro, Allura, and Meri darting among four larger figures. One of the creatures broke off toward a civilian crouched behind a parked car, and the newscaster let out a gasp as Shiro split off from his fight, planting himself between the creature and its intended target. The force of the creature's blow sent Shiro flying back into the wall of a nearby building, and he landed on one knee, shaking his head. The civilian was already sprinting away.

Lance watched, riveted. He wondered if Shiro and the others had already taken out the rest of the creatures, or if there were more loose in the city.

He wondered what had happened to the two Vanda had brought _here_.

“Meanwhile," the newscaster said, her voice thin and strained, "the strangers in white armor continue to fight against the alien monstrosities. There has been no official word on where they came from, but eyewitnesses have claimed that one of Mumbai’s saviors is none other than Takashi Shirogane, the pilot of the ill-fated mission to Kerberos last year.” Whispers and outright gasps rippled through the cadets—even some of the faculty—as Shiro’s official portrait appeared on screen. “Shirogane has long been presumed dead, but the arrival of these reported ‘aliens’ has raised new questions regarding the true fate of the _Persephone_ and her crew.”

Seeing a chance, Lance stepped forward, raising his voice to be heard. "Those eyewitnesses are right! Shiro's alive. He's in Mumbai, fighting against these bastards--" He paused here to gesture toward Vanda with his bayard. "That's because he knows what happens to people who cross paths with the Galra Empire."

Pidge silenced the stream but left the video on as it switched to a view of the bay, where the Black Lion stood near the smaller Galra vessel.

“Iverson sold them out,” they said, their voice low and dangerous. “Shiro. My dad and my brother. He sent them to Kerberos _knowing_ they wouldn’t come back—and then he blamed the tragedy on Shiro.” They turned toward Hawes, trembling with rage. “Now they’re attacking Mumbai. They tried to attack Carlsbad. Hell, they tried to kill my _mom_. Why the fuck are you still working with them?”

“They told you there was no alternative, didn’t they?” Hunk said. He looked almost sorry for them, which was considerably more generous than Lance was feeling. "Didn't they? They said you couldn't drive them off, said there was no one out there who could hope to drive them off, so you might as well cooperate? Save as many lives as you can?"

Lance snorted. “Well, they lied. _We're_ here. _We_ can drive them away. We’ve got allies up there fighting the rest of the fleet. The Galra Empire is strong, but they aren’t invincible.” He paused, considering. “Last chance, Hawes. Help us protect Earth, or go on and betray your entire species to an evil alien dictator who’d just as soon burn you like a lump of coal.”

The man beside Hawes wavered. “Sir,” he whispered. “They never said anything about Kerberos...”

Vanda breathed a short, impatient breath, turned her gun on the soldier, and shot him in the gut. He collapsed, screaming, and one of the other Galra grabbed him by the arm and tossed him toward the knot of students and faculty looking on in ashen-faced horror. “Any other cowards want to choose the losing side?”

Lance tensed, adjusting his grip on his bayard. He wanted to charge in, wanted to stop Vanda, to protect the cadets--his _friends,_ many of them--but they were too close. If Lance started a fight here, too many of them would get caught in the cross-fire.

Then one of the cadets—a fighter pilot named Zach, who was a few years ahead of Lance—made the decision for them all. He ripped the pistol from a holster on Captain Wen’s hip and pointed it at Vanda.

“Woah!” Lance cried, inching toward Zach before Vanda got pissed off and shot him, too. “Okay, everyone _calm down._ Zach, dude, not a good idea." Lance glared at the cadet, but quickly returned his gaze to Vanda, sighting down the length of his barrel. "Give it up, Vanda. You’re outnumbered and you’ve got nowhere to run. Don’t make this harder than it has to be.”

She smiled at him, self-satisfied and cold. “I wouldn’t be too sure about that, boy.” She whistled, and the two cybernetic creatures burst out from the alley between the armory and a training building. Hunk shouted, Pidge’s bayard crackled as they activated it, and Lance forgot all about Vanda as he swung his rifle around and fired at the charging creatures.

All around him was shouting and pounding footsteps. The crack of gunshots reverberated off the buildings, and sparks shot up where bullets met the cyborgs’ heavy armor.

“The eyes!” Lance shouted. “Aim for the eyes!”

The cord of Pidge’s bayard lashed around one creature’s wrist and they ran in a wide arc, keeping away from the spray of bullets as they yanked the creature off-course, Hunk keeping pace beside them. He latched onto Pidge’s waist as the creature tried to pull them off their feet—but the struggle slowed the creature enough for Lance and the soldiers to focus on the first beast. Three lasers and at least two bullets found the gap around the eyes, and the creature hit the ground hard, skidding to a stop at Lance’s feet.

He was already refocused on the other, which went down even more quickly now that the initial panic had calmed.

Lance spun as the danger passed, searching for Vanda and her troops, but they’d already pulled back toward the airfield. Lance gave chase, but he knew it was too late. The soldiers piled into the hangars, emerging moments later in ships that looked like an unnatural fusion of Galra fighters and the Bauer line the Garrison used. They rose into the air as Lance and the others reached the airfield's outer gate.

Hunk managed to take out one of the ships as it lifted off; Lance left a black scorch mark along another’s hull.

Then they were away, and Lance swore, spinning toward Pidge.

“Where are they going?”

Pidge was already running a scan, their face darkening. “Most of the ships are headed directly toward the city, but one of them split off to the west.”

“Toward the canyons?” Hunk asked, frowning.

Lance tapped the side of his helmet, reconnecting to the main comms frequency. “Hey, Meri?”

“Yeah, squirt?” Meri asked, her smile audible even through her labored breathing.

“Can you think of any reason Vanda might be heading back towards where Blue was hidden?”

“Back to—what?” Meri asked. “No. I have no idea.”

"The cache,” Val said. She paused for a moment, recognized the confused silence, and elaborated. “Vanda kept going on about this Altean cache she said was buried in the caverns somewhere. Some kind of Altean superweapon, or information archive or something.”

Meri snorted. “I don’t know about superweapon,” she said. “A busted cryopod, sure. A couple of holovids I watched so many times they got corrupted. Nothing Zarkon would care about.”

“So we can ignore that for now,” Lance said, turning back toward the Blue Lion. “Good to know.”

Pidge grabbed his arm to stop him. He looked down at them, his mind already about five steps ahead of him and trying to plan how to take out twenty-odd hostile aircraft over Carlsbad, and had to reel himself back as Pidge spoke. “This could be a good opportunity,” they said. “She won’t have backup in there. She won’t be able to run away. We should take her out before she gets back to the rest of the fleet and sets in motion whatever else she and Iverson cooked up.”

Lance hesitated. Pidge had a point, but he had to go after the other ships before they leveled the city—he _had_ to. And from Pidge’s furrowed brow, they knew it.

They also knew that Vanda was a sadistic old shit-stain who couldn't be allowed to roam free.

Lance looked at Hunk. “You two think you can handle her without me?”

Pidge nodded at once, Hunk only a moment behind.

“Okay,” Lance said, taking a deep breath. “Okay. But don’t take any unnecessary risks, got it?”

They both nodded, disappeared into the nearest hangar, and reappeared riding a hoverbike not unlike the one Lance had stolen to carry them all out into the canyons on the night they'd first rescued Matt from the Garrison quarantine tent.

Lance turned before they were out of sight, and found the faculty and most of the cadets gathered behind him. He faltered for a moment, feeling suddenly very much out of place. He wasn’t used to his classmates looking at him like that—with awe, and not a little admiration.

“Uh...”

One of the flight instructors, a woman named Lewis, stepped forward. “You seem to know a lot more about this situation than we do,” she said, her voice firm, her eyes darting toward several other instructors, who stood red-faced and silent around her. “Any advice you have would be...appreciated.” Her voice soured at the end, but she squared her shoulders, her face showing no hesitation.

Lance blinked. She was asking _him_ for advice? That was one step short of flat-out putting him in charge of this. _Him_.

He floundered for a moment, then straightened his spine. “Anyone with combat certification, get to a ship. You’re with me. Everyone else, disaster relief protocols. I don’t think Carlsbad’s coming out of this unscathed.”

* * *

Flying into a massive space battle turned out to be less terrifying than Val had expected. Even with the death-lasers flashing all around, even with the _Harbinger_ shaking like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge every time an enemy shot so much as brushed their shields. Even with all of that, Val was still--well-- _functional._

Part of it, she knew, was that there was too much to _do_ to dwell on the sheer terror of the situation. Nyma had her hands full flying them through the fray, navigating close enough to whoever was in gravest danger this time to be of some help. That left Val to man the weapons—still an odd feeling, but growing easier each time she felt the thrill of knocking one of the Galra ships out of the sky.

It was rather cathartic, actually, watching the people who had tormented her for weeks go down in flames.

The other thing deadening her fear? The rumble of a giant, sentient space cat inside her head.

Blue’s voice, if it could be called a voice, was as terrifying as it was soothing, and Val might have panicked right then and there if not for the fact that she could feel something like an echo that she knew without understanding how was coming from Nyma. (It was nice, knowing she wasn't the only one screaming silent panic at the new psychic experience.) More distant still was a flash of humor that, by process of elimination, must have come from either Lance or Meri.

It was all very confusing, and Val really didn’t have time to sort through the implications of this halfway-telepathy.

“How’s the perimeter looking, Reds?” Coran asked. Val glanced up from her laser-turret-arcade-game-console to the distant blur that was the Red Lion. (Red was Matt and Keith, she reminded herself, hoping that somehow putting names and faces and lions together might make this whole thing feel a little bit less surreal.)

Matt blew out a long breath that Val thought summed the situation up quite nicely: things weren’t going well. They weren’t going terribly, but they definitely weren’t going well. Zarkon’s army was massive—many, many times larger than three lions, a castle, and the _Harbinger_ could hope to take on alone. But the lions were vastly superior in strength and agility, and the majority of the fighters were easily distracted by the smaller, weaker _Harbinger._

With Coran taking out a steady chain of more imposing ships—the ones the others called gunships and assault ships—they stayed just this side of real panic. It was dangerous as hell, and _Val_ kind of wanted to panic, but the paladins seemed not to consider any of their close calls to be worth sweating over.

(And thank god for Mrs. H up on the bridge. Her occasional murmurs of fright and disbelief—and her rare curses—were just the reassurance Val needed that the entire universe hadn’t taken a turn toward casual martyrdom somewhere when Val wasn’t looking.)

They just had to hold out a little longer. Coran kept talking about someone called Anamuri—not one of the people Lance had told her about, so presumably an ally who wasn’t in Earth’s immediate vicinity at the moment. Coran insisted she was coming “soon,” and if the paladins could just hold out…

They might have, too. They honestly might have made it, even with two lions and six paladins down on the surface, they might have outlasted Zarkon’s forces.

Then something long, lithe, and almost as black as the void of space slammed into the Yellow Lion, tumbling her end over end. Val caught a brief glimpse of the… creature? Ship? The _thing._ Silhouetted against the assault ship Yellow had been squaring off with, it seemed a blend of both. Its skin was segmented and metallic, its eyes too angular to be natural. But it looked and moved like an extra-large giant squid... If giant squid had hooked metal blades on the end of both hundred-foot-long tentacles, one of which had sunk deep into the Yellow Lion’s flank.

Shay cried out as she was dragged along behind the creature, and Ryner cursed softly as she gave chase in Green.

“What the hell?” Nyma hissed. “What _is_ that thing?”

“Robeast,” Matt said, his voice clipped. The Red Lion wavered on the front lines, obviously torn between going to Shay’s aid and keeping Zarkon’s army at bay. “Shay?”

“I am well,” Shay said, though she didn’t sound it. “Stay where you are. We will… We will hold it off.”

Ryner breathed out slowly. “We will distract it,” she said. “Once the _Kera_ arrives, they can take your place. We will survive until then.”

“I hope so,” Keith muttered.

“We will,” Ryner said firmly. “We have no choice.”

* * *

Akira abandoned his drone controls as the creature—the robeast, was that what they’d called it?--swung its long, sinewy tentacles, flinging the Yellow lion into the Green. Akira had barely been making any headway against the regular ships, his drones so jittery that aiming was nearly impossible. When he landed a hit, it was only because the air was so thick with enemies that it was impossible to miss. And he’d only taken out one ship for every two or three hits.

It was a joke, and now this _thing_ appeared?

Karen was still talking to government officials—she’d made her way up the food chain over the last half hour or so, leaving her cell number with everyone she talked to until someone reached out to her. Someone’s assistant at the UN, Akira thought, though he hadn’t honestly been paying attention. From the terse tone and fragmented sentences, he gathered it wasn't going well. There was just something about alien invasion that made people cling to any other explanation, no matter how thoroughly Karen debunked it.

She faltered now, closing her eyes as she struggled to focus on the conversation with the important someone-or-other, and not on the way the battle had just taken a turn toward cataclysmic.

Beyond Karen, Eli was still narrating his live-stream of the battle, flipping between the fight in Mumbai and the one in space. He, unlike Karen, had no qualms about letting his emotions shine through.

And Akira couldn’t take it anymore.

“How long?” he demanded. “How long until backup arrives?”

Coran’s hands darted from one screen to the next, sifting through mountains of information. “Last I heard, Anamuri was still scrambling fighters. Didn’t want to come through unprepared and all that.”

Akira forced himself to remain calm. “How long?”

“Five minutes?”

That was too long. In five minutes, Takashi and the others might be done with their own battles, and they’d return to the sky to find the other lions turned to robeast fodder and the Galra fleet closing in on Earth unimpeded.

 _Fine._ “Does this place have any fighter jets?”

Three sets of eyes fixed on Akira in silent horror as both Karen and Eli's voices petered out. Even the Altean kid and the two Galra shot glances Akira's way, though they didn’t let their eyes linger. Akira stood firm, waiting for either an answer or a challenge.

“Akira,” Takashi’s voice was a warning that was only slightly lessened for his fatigue.

Akira didn’t let him finish. “I’m doing this, Takashi. They need backup. You’re needed on the ground. Pidge and them aren’t done in Carlsbad. You’re being pulled in too many directions. You're in no position to refuse help.”

Takashi’s silence sounded pained. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”

“I won’t.” Akira forced a smile, if only for his own benefit. “I still have to get the story of these apparently sentient alien lions out of you, don’t I?”

Takashi laughed, the sound as forced as Akira’s smile—but an acknowledgment all the same. _Do what you have to do._

“Coran?” Akira asked.

Coran sighed. “Computer, activate hologram interface. Show Akira the way to the Guard Fighters, Second Cohort.”

Someone—Meri, Akira thought—let out a low whistle, but Akira was distracted by the sudden appearance of a hologram woman. She had long, dark hair and the same markings and pointed ears as the other Alteans, though she carried herself with a grave, almost regal bearing that not even Allura could match.

“Wait—Akira.” Val paused, swearing colorfully. “The refugees—the people who were with me. I think a few of them were military. I don’t know if they’ll be willing to help, but--”

“You’ll be safer with a proper squad,” Coran said, nodding. “It's on the way, in any case. Keturah, stop by the Second Cohort’s lounge on your way to the hangar.”

The hologram woman nodded, then gestured for Akira to follow, and he did so with what he hoped was a cheerful wave for Karen and Eli. The door had hardly closed behind him before he realized what he’d just volunteered for.

War.

Intergalactic war in a ship he didn’t know how to fly against an enemy who far outclassed them.

But damn it all if he was going to back down.

“You are human.”

Akira jumped as the hologram woman spoke. She watched him with sharp eyes, her lips pursed in thought. Akira’s thoughts ground to a halt as he realized the woman was talking _to_ _him_ , and he groped for a response.

“Uh… yes. Yes, I am.”

She nodded. “A curious race. Do all your people throw yourselves into danger as the paladins do?”

“Not _usually_ ,” he said, running his fingers through his hair. “But we’re kinda backed into a corner here. Dictator of the universe trying to kill us and all.” He paused, watching the woman’s face for a reaction. “Why?”

“Idle curiosity,” Keturah said. “I knew your species when it was much younger. You were less...remarkable then.”

Akira laughed. So he was having a conversation with a digital alien so old she remembered his species’ history. Of course he was. Why not? They stepped into an elevator, and Akira gripped the railing behind his back. “Must have been ages ago. Humans have been doing stupid shit for a _long_ time.”

A smile quirked at Keturah’s lips. “Fortunately for us,” she said.

Before Akira could figure out whether that was meant to be a compliment or not, the elevator arrived at its destination, and Keturah glided out of the elevator ahead of him. She didn’t seem to actually touch the floor, though she went through the motions of walking. Akira discreetly checked the ceilings for projectors, wondering how a hologram could continue throughout the castle so seamlessly.

He found nothing, though, and had to hurry to catch up to Keturah as she led him down a long, straight hallway with no doors. For a stretch, there were narrow windows on either side that looked out on the battle. Lasers and explosions painted the floor in bloody hues, and Akira hurried on, his mouth thick. He was glad when Keturah stopped outside a door.

“In here,” she said.

Akira hesitantly touched the button beside the door, then stepped through into a small, comfortable room with several couches and a bar along the far wall. A dozen or so humans were gathered within, and it only took a moment for Akira to begin picking out familiar faces—people who had gone missing on or near Garrison property, or who had been speaking out against the Garrison online.

The refugees turned toward Akira as he entered, wary at first until they realized he was human.

He cleared his throat. “My name is Akira Shirogane. I’m a pilot with the--” He paused, pursing his lips. “ _Formerly_ with the Galaxy Garrison. You may have noticed that this ship is under attack.” The castle shuddered at that moment as though to underscore his point, and several of the refugees ducked, crying out in fear. Akira raised his voice. “The paladins of Voltron are out there fighting against the Galra forces, but they’re outnumbered. I’m going to help them. Is anyone here combat trained?”

Silence for a few seconds. Then a tall Black woman stepped forward, her chin held high. “Captain Eniola Layeni. Pilot with the Stellar Corps. Ground based, but I’ve trained on deep space sims.” She glanced to one side and, reluctantly, another man—his long limbs and blond hair suggesting a Dutch heritage—stepped forward. “This is Jesse van der Berg. He’s been grounded for a few years, but he knows his stuff.”

“That’ll do. Are you willing to fight?”

Layeni and Jesse both nodded, and Akira flashed a smile.

“Keturah?” he said, gesturing for the two pilots to follow. “Let’s go.”

The hangar was the next floor up, and by the time Akira arrived with his two new recruits, two Galra were waiting for them. Layeni and Jesse stiffened, and the Galra bowed their heads.

"I am Ivka," said the one on the right. "And this is Henrok. Coran told us what you intend."

The other Galra, Henrok, bowed his head. “We wish to accompany you.”

Akira glanced at the other humans, wondering if there was going to be trouble. Layeni smoothed her face, then elbowed Jesse and nodded to Akira.

“Okay," Akira said. "Let’s go, then.”

Keturah showed them the flight suits—thin, tough armor, more flexible than what Takashi and the other paladins had been wearing. They weren't much different from the design of Val’s armor, really, with sturdy helmets that he could only assume could be pressurized in case of hull rupture.

Then the five of them were climbing into alien fighters. Akira wished the others luck and took a few moments to scan the controls. He gave a start when a control diagram appeared on the inside of his helmet’s visor, then forced himself to study it. It was complicated as hell, as were most aircraft, but hey. These alien computers seemed to almost be able to read his mind. Maybe they would save his ass if he screwed something up.

God, he hoped so.

Taking the yoke in both hands, Akira powered up the ship, following a sequence dictated by his visor, then led the other four out into the tempest.


	29. The Battle for Earth (Part Two)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last time... Zarkon has made his move for Earth. The paladins stand against him, but they're scattered--Shiro, Allura, and Meri went to Mumbai to contain a force of cybernetic warriors; Lance, Hunk, and Pidge went to the Garrison, where Hunk and Pidge split off to hunt down Vanda while Lance gathered a team of Garrison pilots to stop the Galra ships headed for Carlsbad. Akira rounded up a squad of his own to take into battle, freeing up the remaining paladins to face down the robeast Zarkon brought along with him.
> 
> Meanwhile, Thace is having troubles of his own. He managed to destroy three more ships full of cybernetic warriors, but he was discovered. Now, injured and alone, he's trying to find a way off the ship before Dez is forced to kill him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: Overall an intense but not especially graphic chapter. It's by and large on par with the rest of the fic, but there's a LOT in this chapter (it comes in at over 30k--the longest chapter I've ever written), so it might be more stressful for that reason alone. The one specific warning I can think of is for implied torture (mostly the aftermath). To skip the worst of it, stop reading at, "He knew, in retrospect, that it couldn’t have been long," and jump back in at, "The door slammed shut."
> 
> And I know there are probably some of you for whom the possibility of character death is more stressful than anything else, so if you'd rather know up front who survives and who doesn't, you can look [here.](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/private/162839253139/tumblr_oswbhqQtYd1ttvln6) (Major spoilers at the link, obviously.)

Matt leaned hard on the controls, urging Red onward with every ounce of his will as a headache beat at the inside of his skull. The sky around them was alight with signs of battle—lasers flashing past so thick it felt like he was about to jump into hyperspace, explosions that blossomed and died in an instant like short-lived fireworks, the ultramarine ripple of particle barriers and force fields just barely standing up against the onslaught.

He’d lost track of the other lions in the chaos of the robeast’s arrival. Shiro and Akira’s voices flickered briefly at the edge of his awareness, then were gone. He hadn’t heard from Pidge, Hunk, or Lance since they arrived at the Garrison.

Keith had eyes on the _Harbinger_ , which was taunting a pack of Galra fighters nearby, ostensibly keeping them off the Red Lion’s tail. It felt more like Red was keeping the army off the _Harbinger’s_ tail—doubly so because Keith felt an overwhelming obligation to both Rolo and Lance to keep Nyma and Val safe. It bled through into Matt’s mind and kept them both closer to the freighter than they probably ought to be. Red was best used to skim around the battlefield, striking quickly before darting away. Stuck in one place like this, she—well, she wasn’t _ineffective_ , but it made things tougher.

A laser clipped her hindquarters as Matt and Keith spun among a knot of enemy ships so dense it felt like trying to run through a hailstorm without getting hit. The flash of white seared Matt’s eyes, lending fresh vigor to the jackhammer in his head. He’d first noticed it at the Garrison: a low, throbbing ache he’d attributed to tension, but which had only grown worse as the day wore on. The battle against Vanda’s forces, with all its lasers and roller-coaster flying, hadn’t helped, and now…

The squid-like robeast barreled past them in pursuit of Ryner and the Green Lion, a flash of green-black-white as both combatants unleashed on each other with everything in their arsenal. The display made Matt’s eyes ache and sent a dagger of white-hot pain deeper into his brain.

Keith winced even as he spun Red around and seized one of the robeast’s tentacles in her mouth, yanking hard and slowing the creature enough for Ryner to catch her breath.

“You sure you’re okay?” Keith asked. His words had the tentative tone of someone who’d asked the same question too many times and knew he probably shouldn’t be asking again. The fact that this was the first time he’d asked aloud didn’t change much.

“I’ll be fine,” Matt said, squeezing one eye shut. His left eye, the one that had been changed by the crystals, seemed to be more sensitive to the light, and his headache lessened slightly (or at least didn’t get worse) with it closed. “We’ve got bigger problems.”

Keith dropped this issue, the bond between them taut with the mounting pressure. Ryner drifted away from the robeast as it zeroed in on the Red Lion, and Green's lightning flashed just before the inky black creature lunged.

Matt and Keith caught themselves, twisting so the creature slid off them and twirled away, tentacles flaring with a deep violet glow—not bright, but bright enough to assault Matt’s sense. Red spun around, activating her cannon and lining up a shot.

A dozen fighters bore down on them from above, and Matt barely spotted them in time to move aside. Their laser went wide, shrieking along the side of the robeast’s head as it reoriented. Matt shot down three of the fighters before Keith had to wrench them aside, spiraling through the air to keep away from the creature’s attacks.

“Shiro? Lance?” Matt grimaced as the lion took a solid hit from one of the robeast’s tentacles. “How much longer?”

"Down to the last three, I think,” Shiro said, “but they’ve fled into the city. We’re trying to track them down. Lance?”

Lance hummed. “I’ve at least got a visual on these bastards, but taking them out without destroying the city is going to be tough. I’m trying to make it quick.”

“And Anamuri?” Keith asked.

“Nearly ready to launch,” Coran said. “Just a little longer.”

Matt was about to protest that they didn’t _have_ a little longer, not when they were up against a literal armada, but just then a barrage of lasers took out the Galra fighters on their tail. Five small, sleek ships—more curved than the Galra fighters, painted black and gold with stripes of pale glowing blue—flew into the opening. The one in the lead dipped its wing as though in salute.

“--maybe...? Ah-hah!” Akira’s face appeared suddenly on the viewscreen, sharp and imposing beneath an angular gray helmet. The image was grainy, as though the cockpit of his ship was as dark as its exterior, and the faint blue glow that lit his face from beneath cast harsh shadows around his eyes.

“Akira!” Keith said, exuding a current of surprise and gratitude that caught Matt off-guard. “You—what are you doing out here?”

“You guys looked like you could use the help,” Akira said. “And since Takashi’s tied up down below, someone else has to look out for you.” His smile was just a bit too wide to be genuine, and the lighting made his whole face seem gaunt, but his eyes met Matt’s steadily. “Don’t worry. We’ve got your back. Just focus on that...whatever it is...”

Matt chuckled, even as he wheeled around to face the robeast. He spotted the _Harbinger_ converging with Akira’s squad, which hopefully would give them all a better shot at coming out of this in one piece. “Be careful,” Matt said. “Let us know if you start getting swarmed.”

Akira nodded, then wheeled around to challenge the fighters trying to catch him from behind. Keith’s mind tracked him for a long moment, even as Red charged after the robeast, engulfing it in flame before it could knock Ryner out of the sky.

 _He’ll be fine,_ Matt thought, as much for himself as for Keith. _We’ve got backup on the way._

A twinge of skepticism was his only answer. Keith knew as well as Matt that Akira had no experience in a fight like this—and unlike the paladins, he couldn’t count on his ship to take the initiative if he got overwhelmed.

 _We’ll keep an eye on him._ It could have been either of them who thought it, for it was a point on which they both wholeheartedly agreed. They would watch Akira the same way they would watch the _Harbinger,_ whatever Zarkon threw their way. It struck Matt as the kind of self-destructive protective instinct you were more likely to get from a yellow or a black or, hell, a blue. The Red Lion was supposed to be a blade. Her paladins were supposed to worry about striking out, about doing damage, not about standing guard.

But Red wasn’t protesting this decision. She had a protective streak a mile deep, and though she didn’t often fight defensively, she would when the situation called for it.

Right now, the situation was screaming _stall_ , and Red growled as they shot down a squadron headed for the others.

It hit Matt hard—a ringing in his head, hot coals in his eyes, and an intense white that overtook his vision. He’d been focused on the area immediately around him: the robeast, the gunships trying to catch Red off-guard, the other lions and the Guard ships flitting around the _Harbinger_. Then, it was as though time skipped, the battlefield rearranging itself around Matt in the instant of whiteness. Keith pressed at him, stunned and alarmed, but still in possession of all his senses.

 _What was that?_ Matt wondered.

He didn’t need Keith to explain, for at that moment, another bolt of lightning shot toward them, so intense Matt had to squeeze his eyes shut. Even looking through Red’s eyes, it stung, and he could do nothing to help as Keith spun them about, dodging through ships and scrap metal as the storm chased them down. They were nearly to the outskirts of the battle before the lightning tapered off, and they turned to find the other lions dodging more lightning as the robeast redoubled its assault.

“Quiznak,” Coran muttered. “They’re negating my attacks!”

Matt watched through slitted eyes as more lightning, black this time, forked across the sky, hardly visible against the stars until it met the castle-ship’s lasers and consumed the blue-white light.

Goosebumps rippled across Matt’s flesh, the crystal scars on his face itching like a scab that needed to be scratched. “Druids,” he said. Behind him, Keith swore.

"This is bad,” Zelka muttered. “Their reach is too long; we can’t get at any of their heavy artillery as long as those druids are in the way.”

“And we’re toast if we try to get inside their range,” Matt added. “ _Vrekt._ ”

“Do we have any weapons that can get through?” Ryner asked.

Matt knew the answer before Coran spoke. “I’m afraid not. Everything we have is Quintessence-based. The druids will siphon it down to nothing before it makes it close to the flagship.”

“Then one of us will have to go in there.”

Keith’s words silenced the conversation, and Matt felt the unease prickle across both their backs as they waited for someone to speak up. Keith’s line of reasoning coiled into Matt’s mind, crystal clear and already set in stone. The druids were a perfect defense against an aerial assault. They could negate lasers and elemental attacks like Red’s fire or Green’s lightning. They could attack from a distance, too, draining a lion before it could come at them with a jawblade or other physical attack.

But if one of the paladins could get inside Zarkon’s flagship, then circle down to the hangars where the druids were stationed, then maybe—maybe.

“It has to be me,” Keith said, realizing at the same time as Matt that no one was arguing against his plan. “Most of our frontliners are down on the ground, and I’ve got the best shot besides Pidge at getting through security.”

“Hold on,” Karen said, her voice shaking. “Sorry, I must have misheard. He wants to go in _there_?” She paused, and Matt could imagine her gesturing toward the massive warship. The central structure was several times larger than any warship they’d fought before—two or three times larger, even, than Haggar’s vessel—and there was a ringlike outer structure big enough to encircle the castle-ship and then some. The druids were stationed here, spread out around the ring as an outer defense. “Alone?”

“We’ve done stuff like this before, Mom,” Pidge said, their voice low. “I know it looks bad, but it’s nothing Keith can’t handle.”

Hunk muttered something that sounded vaguely skeptical, but he put up no real argument.

Akira, on the other hand, had gone pale. His video feed popped up again, and his eyes flickered side-to-side as though seeing Keith for the first time. “Woah. No. No way, how old are you, like, sixteen?”

“I can do this," Keith growled. "I’m the only one who can do this.”

Akira’s face darkened. “But--”

“Akira,” Shiro said, his voice thick with fatigue. “Keith is right. You have to trust him on this. Keith...” Shiro breathed in and held it for a moment. Keith squirmed with guilt; he knew as well as Matt did how dangerous this was, and how hard Shiro would be hit if anything happened to him. “Don’t take more risks than you have to. One of us will come in there to help as soon as we can get back in the air.”

Keith nodded, and he and Matt veered away from the battle with the robeast. Ryner and Shay pressed forward, holding its attention so the Red Lion could slip past. Akira kept up a stream of muttered curses as they flew, and Keith was—surprisingly—not upset by Akira's lack of confidence in him. If anything, he seemed touched.

They came in at a wide angle, avoiding a thin branch of lightning that tried to wrap around them. Matt’s vision fuzzed for an instant, his head spinning as Quintessence thickened the air around him. The cockpit lights were overbright suddenly, and he squeezed his eyes shut until Keith punched a hole in the outer ring as close to the first druid as they dared get. The vertigo passed, and Matt turned as Keith sprinted for the exit.

“Be careful,” Matt said.

Keith paused, and in the moment before their bond faded, Matt felt a flicker of warmth. “Don’t worry,” Keith said with a small smile. “I’ll be back before you know it.” Then he charged forward, and Matt pulled back with the Red Lion, leaving Keith alone in Zarkon’s headquarters.

 _You’d damn well better keep that promise, Keith,_ Matt thought, _or Shiro and Akira won’t be the only pissed off brothers coming after you._

* * *

Lance and the Blue Lion danced in the air above Carlsbad, trying to minimize collateral damage. He’d managed to catch up with Vanda’s forces just outside the city and take down half a dozen, sending the flaming wreckage spiraling down into open desert. The rest had made it to the edge of the city, though, where a downed ship could do nearly as much damage as one still in the air.

The worst part was that it wasn’t just Galra on those ships. There were humans with them. Humans who were actively shooting at office buildings and hotels and parks. Lance had probably already killed more than a few humans in shooting down the first ships, but he couldn’t bring himself to feel guilty about that. All he felt was a helpless rage as he watched his home burn.

Blue seized a ship in her jaw, and Lance pivoted, flinging the ship out into the desert, where it landed in a flurry of sand and smoke. He spotted lights in the distance—the sun reflecting off the rest of the Garrison fleet—and had Blue connect to the Garrison’s radio frequencies as he dove back into battle.

“We need to take these guys out fast,” Lance said. “Chase them out of town if you can—Lambda Formation.” He remembered only after he spoke that these were fully qualified pilots and officers, many of them a decade older than him or more, most with hundreds or thousands of hours of flight time on him.

But they acknowledged his orders like he was actually in charge, then broke off in squads of six to corral the enemy out toward open air. With two ships directly behind the target and the other four spread out to hem them in, there was nowhere for Vanda’s pilots to go but forward. Some of them returned fire, knocking two Garrison ships out of the sky. Others redoubled their assault on the city, ignoring their pursuers until bullets found their engines and they tore themselves apart.

Lance pushed himself harder than ever before, icing the wings of the few ships who remained unhindered, chasing after ships as they fell to try to put them down where they wouldn't hurt anyone.

His efforts weren’t entirely successful. Fires burned in several places across the city, and at least two blocks downtown had been leveled in the attack. People ran screaming through the streets, and emergency responders fought panicked drivers and abandoned vehicles as they sped toward the worst of the damage.

“Get down there,” Lance said to his soldiers as soon as the last enemy ship was down. He and Blue flew one last circuit of the city, checking for survivors who might regroup and launch another attack. “Do whatever you can.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve got another fight to get to.” Lance paused, pulling Blue to a halt as he completed his circuit. “Actually, if any of you know how to handle yourselves in space, there’s still a battle to be won, and my team can use all the backup we can get.”

There was a moment of silence, and then, “Felicity Reynolds. Combat certified for eleven years. I’ve done two runs to the ISS. Count me in.”

She’d hardly finished speaking when another pilot jumped in. “Michael Li. I only completed my combat certs last year, but I’ve been flying supply runs outside the atmosphere for seven years now.”

Before Lance knew it, he had seven ships peeling away from the city while the rest went to join the rescue efforts on the ground. Lance hailed Coran, asking him to get the human pilots pointed in the right direction, then locked onto the Black Lion’s signal and headed off toward Mumbai.

“How’s it coming Shiro?” Lance asked, switching over to a semi-private line targeted at the three paladins waiting for him.

“Almost finished,” Shiro said. “Finally.”

Allura grunted, her breath coming ragged. “We’re down to the last creature—and it’s already wounded. Won’t be long now.”

“Perfect. Meri, I’m coming to get you.”

“Roger that, kiddo.”

Lance wrinkled his nose, dropping close to the surface of the water as he skimmed across the ocean. “Kiddo? Really?”

Meri just laughed, the sound slightly strained as something thumped near her microphone. Lance heard a gunshot, then someone—Allura, he thought—roaring. After that, there was a long moment of silence.

“Thank the ancients,” Allura breathed. She sounded winded, which was a testament to these creatures’ power. Lance was glad he’d been able to take most of his targets out from above.

“All right, Lance,” Meri said. “We’re headed back toward the bay.”

Lance spotted the city ahead, with the Black Lion crouched in the water near the shore. Blue roared a greeting as she approached, and Black lifted her head, creating a ripple in the crowd that had gathered around her. Three small, armored figures slipped through the crowd, leaving a vacuum in their wake as people recoiled from the sight of them—maybe recognizing that they’d fought the alien monsters, maybe just frightened of their strange armor and weapons.

“I’ve got you,” Lance said, dropping down beside the Black Lion and leaning Blue’s head forward until the end of her ramp hovered just above the low retaining wall dividing the street from the rocky beach.

Meri leaped off the wall and sailed into the opening, landing with a thump and scrambling up to the cockpit. Lance gave her a brief once-over, noting the oddly-colored blood on her armor and the sizable dent in her breastplate.

“You gonna be okay?” he asked, turning them toward the sky as Shiro and Allura settled into their cockpit. Their presence slid into the back of Lance’s mind like a hand into a glove, the familiarity of it making him smile.

Meri nodded, fanning herself as she leaned against Lance’s seat. “That was quite the workout. But I’m good. I’m fine.”

“Not out of shape after ten thousand years?” he asked, reaching back to poke her between the eyes.

She laughed, swatting his hand away. “Watch it, you little runt. I’ll bet I can still put you in your place on the training deck.”

“I’ll have to take you up on that challenge later." They cleared the atmosphere, and Lance unbuckled and slid out of his seat. He nudged Meri toward it as he headed for the back of the cockpit, to the hidden compartment where Meri had found the glider before. There were two left, and Lance smothered his fear as he pulled one out. Nothing like hurtling through a space battle with zero armor to make a guy feel safe.

Meri was still gaping at him when he turned around, glider in hand. Blue was flying just fine on her own, though she’d slowed a little, allowing Black to surge ahead toward the battle.

“Lance,” Meri said, her shock beginning to fade to irritation. “What are you doing?”

“Going after Keith,” Lance said, heading for the ramp.

Meri grabbed him by the arm. He turned, expecting her to try to argue all the reasons it should be someone else going. Instead, she just stared at him, her brow furrowed, an unreadable expression on her face. Blue rumbled happily, the sound reverberating in Lance’s chest.

It was Shiro who finally broke the silence. “Lance, this is Zarkon’s warship we’re talking about. Security in there is going to be hell.”

“All the more reason for me to go now. I’m not leaving Keith alone in there.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to,” Shiro said. “But I’m the one who’s going in.”

Lance closed his eyes as Meri squeezed his arm and headed for the pilot seat, evidently resigned to the fact that Lance was going to do this, one way or another. “Shiro, with all due respect, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“What?” Shiro hissed. “Why not?”

“Look at us. Hunk and Pidge are still dealing with Vanda down on the ground. Keith and I are going to be inside Zarkon’s ship. The rest of you are fighting a massive army and a robeast. You’ll have to form Voltron to take out the robeast, but after that, you’ll have to split up. You _will_. Which means we’re going to need you and Allura and the Black Lion working together to keep track of everything.”

Shiro was silent for a long moment, but it was a tense sort of silence, like he meant to continue arguing just as soon as he figured out how.

Lance didn’t wait for Shiro to come up with another excuse. He headed down to the base of Blue’s jaw, sealed his helmet, and settled himself over the glider. “We need the two of you out here, Shiro,” he said, gesturing to Meri that he was ready. “Shay and Ryner and Matt don’t have anyone else to pilot their lions right now, and no one else has the experience to do this. You know I’m right.”

“Okay,” Shiro said, sighing. “Go. But we’ll be watching. If things go south in there, I’m coming in.”

Lance chuckled. “Yes, sir, Mr. Black Paladin, sir.” He paused as Meri began to count down from five. “Seriously, though. I’ll bring him back.”

“Just make sure to bring yourself back, too.”

"Right. Here goes nothing." The Blue Lion opened her mouth, and Lance tumbled out into open space.

* * *

Hunk kept his mouth shut as Lance headed off toward Zarkon’s warship, even though he wanted to scream. It seemed like the universe just wasn’t going to cut them any slack today. First Zarkon’s fleet, then the cybernetic monsters, then the robeast, and now druids.

Team Voltron had come a long way in two and a half months, from four scared humans and two grieving aliens to three times that--twelve paladins, Coran's crew, and now Akira's squad. And it still wasn’t enough.

So Hunk kept quiet, even though he desperately wanted to tell Lance to be careful. To tell _Keith_ to be careful, for that matter, because Lance at least would be conscious of his family back on the castle-ship and would do everything in his power to make sure Luz and Mateo never had to see him bloodied or—god forbid—dying. Keith, on the other hand…

It wasn’t just a desire not to expose his panic to everyone on the comms that kept Hunk quiet. No, he was following Vanda, together with Pidge, and the reptilian woman wasn’t far enough away for either of them to risk speaking. He glanced at Pidge, then switched over to a private channel. The comms could amplify their voices, but the conversation going on overhead was loud enough without help.

They’d tailed Vanda deep into the caverns beneath the mountains, following much the same path as Hunk and Lance had walked when they found the Blue Lion so long ago. The carvings were still etched into the walls, but this time they weren’t glowing—probably because Lance and Blue were both so far away. Not that Hunk was complaining. Glowing cat paintings would have been a bit of a dead giveaway for the half-dozen Galra up ahead.

“I don’t get why we haven’t just attacked,” Hunk whispered, so low he could barely hear himself. “It’s not like there’s a lot of them. We can totally take them, then get back up to the others.”

Pidge was already shaking their head. “Vanda didn’t come down here for nothing, Hunk. I want to know what she’s after.”

Hunk sighed, but didn’t push the issue. Not like they could have magically teleported up into their lions from here, anyway. The battle would probably be decided by the time Hunk and Pidge made it back to the surface; they should at least try to do something meaningful in the meantime.

They walked a few minutes longer in silence, pausing in deep shadows whenever Vanda’s pace slowed. Hunk had thought, at first, that she was searching the caves in one last desperate bid for the “Altean cache,” but she seemed too confident for that, like she knew exactly where she was going.

Then, finally, she stopped. Hunk and Pidge pulled back into a recess in the cavern wall where there was no chance of anyone turning and discovering their presence.

Vanda stood at the lip of a deep, dark pit. The hovering lights she’d brought with her descended into the blackness, revealing a hollow that plunged far deeper than Hunk would have expected. Hunk leaned out, frowning, while Pidge glanced upward. In a heartbeat, they’d scaled the wall, gaining a perch some ten feet over Hunk’s head.

“Do you see anything?” Hunk whispered.

Pidge hummed thoughtfully. “It just looks like… a pit. This isn’t where you found Blue, is it?”

“No way. That place was more dome-shaped. No creepy holes to hell.”

“Huh. I wonder what she… _what?_ ”

Hunk didn’t like the edge of disgust he heard in Pidge’s voice. He stretched up on his toes, trying to get a better view of the action, but all he could see was Vanda and her guards ranged around the lip of the pit and the faint glow of crystallight on the walls of the cavern. The Galra cast exaggerated shadows around Hunk that made the whole place feel like a ghost story brought to life, and he had to force himself to breathe.

“What is it?” he asked. “What do you see?”

“I… I don’t know,” Pidge muttered. “But… it kinda looks like an egg. A really, _really_ big egg.”

* * *

"Just a little longer!” Akira roared, pulling to the side as a massive laser flashed past his ship. "We just need to hold out a little longer." He would hand it to the Alteans: they knew a thing or two about intuitive design. He still felt more than a little hobbled by a dash full of controls he didn’t know what to do with, but the important things—the weapons, the thrust and steering, the shield—they were easy enough to figure out. Everything else, really, was gut instinct.

Layeni was cursing in a blend of languages. Akira thought he’d picked out a little bit of French, but the rest of it he couldn’t begin to identify beyond the general sentiment of, _This isn’t going great._ That translated perfectly well across languages.

He caught a glimpse of the rest of the battle as he rolled back toward his squad. They’d formed up around the castle-ship, doing what they could to keep Zarkon’s army at bay while the paladins challenged the robeast. And in case the day hadn’t been weird enough, Akira now had to deal with the fact that he’d just seen his brother’s lion mecha link together with four other Crayola Lions to form a giant Transformer.

Voltron, apparently, had been the alien fever dream that had inspired many a mangaka over the years.

Voltron, at least, was holding its own, or so Akira surmised from the brief image he saw. They had a giant sword in their hand, and several robeast tentacles floated around them like a calamari dish waiting to be assembled. It might have been cool if it wasn’t so viscerally disturbing.

Still, Akira had his own problems to worry about. Coran kept saying Anamuri was “on her way,” Karen could be heard growling in the background, and Eli had given up narrating the battle for the folks back home to take up the controls of some of the castle’s security drones. They were cute little roomba-looking things, maybe as big as an inner tube, but they were agile, and they were keeping the enemy off Akira’s tail, which was all anyone could ask for at this point.

But even with the drones, even with Val and Nyma in the _Harbinger_ buzzing enemy ships, even with Akira’s half-trained team of pilots, they weren’t making much a dent in Zarkon’s forces.

Another massive laser slammed into the castle-ship, flaring red across its shields, and Eli let loose a torrent of curses as his drone wavered, then exploded under the next barrage.

“Akira!” Val hollered, and Akira took off for the _Harbinger_ at once. They flanked the gunship firing on the castle, hitting it with everything they had. Nyma pulsed something she’d called a disruptor, and a few shots slipped through the narrow gap before the gunship’s shields came back online. The laser faltered, and the ship listed, its lights going dim.

Akira turned back toward his squad just in time to see Jesse’s ship swallowed up by a laser. He screamed, short and terrified, in the instant before he was consumed.

Akira felt sick.

“We can’t keep this up,” Nyma hissed. “Where the fuck is Anamuri?”

“She’s--” Coran heaved a sigh. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t--”

He cut off as a new wave of fighters entered the fray, dissolving a dozen Galra fighters with their onslaught. Akira recognized the Garrison logo on their wings even before Coran identified them as the troops Lance had sent up to help.

Seven. There were only seven of them. True, that was double what he had now, but he was so outmatched seven ships was hardly a drop in the barrel.

Akira’s spirits faltered, but then he saw more ships coming behind. These didn’t have the Garrison’s logo, but instead the blue sunburst of the Brazilian space corps, the red hourglass of Russia, the golden eclipse of China.

It was Karen, this time, who gave a cheer, feeble though it was. “Thank god,” she muttered. “They actually listened.”

Soon enough, the newcomers began to hail the castle and its support ships, asking for information, for direction.

“Who’s in charge?” someone asked, and Akira waited for Coran to step forward.

“Akira.”

Akira’s thoughts stuttered. “What—me?”

Coran opened a video feed and flashed him a thumbs-up. “I’ve got some yelmore-wrangling of my own to do,” he said nodding to the side. Akira glanced up and saw a blue-white portal forming in empty air. “I’ll coordinate with Anamuri, you organize your human forces. Probably best we have our liaison be someone who isn’t still hung-up on the fact that your species isn’t as unique as you thought, eh?”

Akira had to laugh at that, because if Coran thought he was over the aliens-are-out-there mind-fuckery, then the man obviously didn’t know much about humans.

But the gathered forces were still awaiting a command, and god damn it all if it didn’t look like Akira was all they were going to get. “All right,” he said. “This big white beauty here is the Castle of Lions, and she’s on our side. She's got civilians on board, so protecting her is the top priority. The giant robot man over there? That’s Voltron. They’re friendly, but best to give them space. And those people coming through that--” He paused, but there really was no better word for it-- “that wormhole—those are allies, too. Everyone else is fair game. We’re dealing with highly advanced alien civilizations here, so their weapons and shields are going to far outclass your own. Focus on the little ones, and try to stick close to the Castle. Understood?”

There was a chorus of muttered voices as Akira’s instructions were translated into a variety of languages, and then someone asked, “I’m sorry, sir, but… who are you?”

Akira paused, weighing the pros and cons of faking a station he didn’t hold. On the one hand, he was pretty sure he’d piss off a lot of people who carried a lot of big guns. On the other hand, he needed these people to listen to him and not try to run off on their own.

Before Akira could come to a decision, Coran spoke for him.

“That’s Lieutenant Commander Akira Shirogane, Head of the Voltron Guard. I’ll be coordinating with our other allies, so consider him the man in charge.”

The chorus this time was much sharper, calls of confirmation and respect flooding the airwaves as Akira tried to wrap his head around what Coran had just said. Their eyes locked for an instant, and Coran smiled.

“Safe flying, Commander,” he said, then cut the comms, leaving Akira alone with fifty military-grade vessels under his command.

Well. This ought to be interesting.

* * *

The inside of Zarkon’s warship looked, in all honesty, about as ominous as Lance had expected. Little, jagged crystals glowed along the walls, casting faint shadows down the hallways. Soldiers and sentries patrolled in pairs, their footsteps echoing all around until it felt like Lance was surrounded, even when he could see no sign of an enemy anywhere near him. The hallway had just enough of a curve to it to make Lance feel like had blinders on, and he kept glancing around him for hiding places in case things went from mostly-okay to definitely-not-okay.

He had a minimalist display pulled up on his visor, blinking an indication of Keith’s direction. It wasn’t like he needed a whole lot of detail; out here in the outer ring of the structure, there were basically only two directions to go. Hell, there weren’t even rooms on the right side of the hall, just a blank metal wall glowing with the sickly purple light of the crystals.

He heard Keith before he saw him—grunts and ringing metal and the teeth-numbing buzz of lightning filling the air. Lance picked up the pace, sprinting until the indicator on his visor swung around. Lance pivoted, veering toward the closest door and shooting the control panel until the door slid open.

Lightning snaked out toward him, and Lance wasn’t quite fast enough to get his shield up. Black tendrils wrapped around him, sapping his strength. He had an instant to panic, staggering back from the attack on legs that didn’t want to cooperate, before the lightning vanished, leaving Lance to sag against the wall behind him. Druids. He _hated_ druids.

Then Keith let out a pained, weary shout from beyond the door, and Lance forced himself upright, surging toward the opening—this time with his shield up to catch whatever the druids might toss his way.

He stopped in the door, taking in the situation at a glance. Keith sprinted through a hangar of some sort, long and narrow and with one whole wall open to the battle beyond. There were no ships here now, but there were crates and barrels and glass tubes that glowed yellow and violet and metal support pillars reaching up some thirty feet to the ceiling. Keith used all of it as cover, ducking and twisting as the two druids took aim at him with their magic. A third druid lay lifeless on the floor, a puddle of thin black liquid fanned out around them. Footprints blurred the edges of the puddle, tracking the blood across the floor. Lance was reminded, incongruously, of spilled coffee.

Neither of the surviving druids had yet noticed Lance, and he didn’t wait long enough for them to realize their mistake. Dismissing his shield, he raised his rifle, sighted down the barrel, and shot the first druid in the head. Even as he fell, and the other whirled to find the source of the attack, Lance adjusted his aim and fired again, but the second druid teleported away. She landed in the hallway behind Lance, the static charge of her magic warning him a split second before she struck.

With a yelp, he dove forward, somersaulting behind a metal container and keeping his head down.

“Lance?” Keith wheezed.

Lance managed a feeble laugh. “To the rescue.”

Keith snorted. His feet scraped across the ground as he shifted his stance, and before Lance could tell him to be careful, he was off, sprinting toward the druid like an avalanche barreling down a mountainside. Except Keith and an avalanche had at least one major difference: the avalanche couldn’t be killed by a healthy dose of magic lightning.

The druid released her magic in a crackling wave, and Keith caught most of it on his shield, letting his momentum carry him forward, his eyes slitted against the bright light. His blade found the druid’s shoulder, breaking her concentration just long enough for Lance to put a laser between her eyes.

Keith stumbled to a stop, breathing hard. Even from his hiding spot, Lance could make out the tremble in Keith’s hands, the way he had to try a few times to deactivate and sheathe his sword, the way his shield arm started to lift, like he wanted to press a hand to his forehead, but gave up halfway. He closed his eyes, grimacing, and Lance aimed a sigh at the ceiling.

“Okay, see, _this_ is why no one trusts you to go off on your own,” Lance said, dismissing his bayard and crossing to where Keith stood. Lance couldn’t see the flow of Quintessence out of him and into Keith, but as soon as Lance’s hand touched his shoulder, he straightened up, eyes clearing. He stared for a few seconds at the ground, his breathing slowly evening out, his shoulders losing their slump. It was a strange sensation, no doubt about it—not least of all because Lance couldn’t feel any real difference in himself as Keith borrowed his Quintessence—but it sure as hell beat leaving Keith staggering through the ship like a drunken monkey. “Better?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, blinking a few times. He turned, offering a smile. “Nice timing.”

Lance allowed himself a self-satisfied smile. “Thanks,” he said, then smacked the back of Keith’s helmet. “Now how about you cool it with the suicide plays?”

Keith scowled as he straightened his helmet. “We’re dealing with _druids_ , Lance. I’m pretty sure anything is at least mildly suicidal.”

“Eh.” Lance pressed his index finger to the center of Keith’s visor, making him lean backward as he tried to follow the movement. “There’s a difference between necessary risk and flinging yourself off the bridge of self-preservation.”

Keith grabbed Lance’s hand and yanked it away from his face. “Then _you_ take the lead, if you think you’re so smart.”

“If you insist.” Lance turned and headed for the door. “Come on, samurai. We’re not done yet.”

* * *

Meri had never formed Voltron before. Paladin trainees didn’t have enough of a bond with their lions for it to work, and by the time she’d stepped up to fill Lealle’s overwhelming shadow, Zarkon had been long gone.

The thought brought a current of grief from Allura, along with answering sympathy from Shiro. Both were only semi-tangible in the union, their minds tangled together and spread out through Voltron’s body, _beyond_ Voltron’s body to the other paladins scattered across the system. Meri, Ryner, Shay, and Matt only caught a fraction of what their leaders saw, but it was enough to know that Lance and Keith had found each other and were moving on to the third hangar where druids were stationed; that Nyma and Val and the rest of Akira’s crew were holding their own, slowly eating away at Zarkon’s forces. The rebel forces were a blaze of light in the far distance, hammering the enemy from the far side.

Voltron turned, and Meri’s mind followed like a piece of driftwood caught in the tide, pulled along by the inertia of a presence much larger than herself. Ryner extended consolation, her mind a steady presence that moved with the tide of thought without being uprooted, and Meri felt a song in her bones that she knew, instinctively, came from Shay. They helped to ground her, and Matt’s quicksilver impulses propelled her along as Voltron danced with the robeast.

They were slower than they had been, in the memories that skimmed across the surface of the bond. Meri glimpsed other battles, battles where Voltron was agile and fluid, dancing with a sword and a whip, thrumming with self-awareness and awareness of the enemy around them.

Meri had never been part of a battle like this, but she felt the drag of the missing paladins scattered across the system.

The robeast twisted, tentacles flaring. It had lost several already to Matt’s sword, but the two longest, the ones that ended in blades nearly the length of a lion’s head, were still intact, still flashing across the battlefield with terrifying accuracy. Ryner raised the shield as the blades swung in, and they skittered off the metal, one flying wide, one scoring across Voltron’s midsection. It was a glancing blow, but it delivered a twinge of pain to all six minds.

_Focus._

The command came from Shiro, from Allura, not so much a thought as a desire, and Meri yielded herself to it at once, letting her mind sink deeper into the bond as the others did the same. They weren’t paladins in this moment, each sequestered away in their own lion. They were Voltron, and no robeast could stand against them.

The creature came at them again, and they twisted, raising their sword and twisting to catch the tentacles questing for their heart. The robeast realized too late the trap it had fallen into. It strained, trying to disentangle its limbs, suckers adhering to the Red Lion’s head, warping the metal as the robeast fought. Matt fought harder, and Ryner cracked her shield across the creature’s head. An image condensed in their minds—a yellow cannon unleashing a corona of death. But no—Hunk had the yellow bayard, and he was on the ground.

Shay’s song changed, ghostly echoes questing outward along the intangible bond that linked the black paladins to their companions. The bond stretched, stretched, and found a glimmer of light.

It took only an instant for Hunk to understand the question. His hand opened, and the bayard he held vanished, reappearing in Shay’s hand in the cockpit of the Yellow Lion. She smiled, a pleased warmth spreading out from her center, and fitted the bayard into the cavity that opened up on the control panel before her.

The cannon coalesced on Voltron’s shoulder, a heavy weight that dragged Matt down, adding to the strain of the robeast. Shiro and Allura bolstered him, their minds bending toward him, toward the robeast, as Shay took aim.

The blast shook them, rattling in Meri’s teeth as she and Shay struggled to keep them stable. The robeast screamed, not a sound so much as a shudder than ran through its body; the tentactles still wound around Voltron’s sword shivered with pain, jostling the blades biting into the Red Lion’s head. With one final, tremendous convulsion, the robeast tore the sword out of Red’s grip.

Once separated from Red, the sword vanished, freeing the robeast—but it was limping now, more than a few of its limbs drifting lifeless around its body, its longer, bladed tentacles lethargic as it snapped at Voltron once more. Shay released her bayard back to Hunk, and Matt reformed the sword at Shiro’s silent direction. Meri breathed deeply, lined up for a charge, then reached out to Shay and thrust forward at the same time. Matt and Ryner gripped the sword between them, Shiro and Allura centering Voltron’s mass behind it. The robeast swirled, glowing with Quintessence, and tried to flee, but it was too badly injured. It managed half a body length before the tip of Voltron’s sword caught it just below the beak and pierced straight through the brain.

* * *

Zarkon’s fury resonated through the halls of his command ship, an animal scream of fury so deep more than a few petty officers ran for cover. Haggar, locked deep in the heart of the ship in an effort to ignore the emperor’s grudge match going on outside the artificial atmosphere, sighed. There were dozens of things that needed her attention—robeast designs that needed approval, cybernetic enhancements with kinks that needed to be smoothed out, research on Zarkon’s bayard, research on synthetic Quintessence and the modified Balmera crystals that had escaped the destruction of Vanda’s ship. And of course the new lab out in the Jessaranti Asteroid Belt, which needed Haggar’s personal guidance as they got off the ground.

But the emperor was getting huffy again, which meant any moment now he would be hollering for her to help him launch one asinine stunt or another.

Not for the first time, she wondered how he’d managed to not only claim the throne of the Galra Empire, but hold it for ten thousand years. Truly it was a mystery for the ages.

Moving swiftly, but with no small degree of irritation, Haggar straightened her materials, saved the file she had been reviewing, and headed for the door. She had just emerged from the elevator into Zarkon’s command room when his rage finally condensed itself to mere words.

“Where is Haggar?” he seethed, his cloak flaring as he spun in circles, attempting to pin down an officer with enough spine to look him in the eye.

 _Emperor of the Universe, and he carries himself like a child denied a favorite toy,_ Haggar thought, keeping the sneer off her face through force of long habit. “I’m here, sire,” she said, and if Zarkon still remembered how to hear the derision she didn’t deign to wear on her sleeve, he was smart enough not to try reprimanding her for it. Zarkon might crack the whip in this empire of his, but they both knew Haggar supplied the power.

Zarkon breathed in, straining for the calm he so prided himself in. “They’ve destroyed another of your robeasts,” he said, managing to make it sound like a threat.

Rolling her eyes was beneath Haggar, but the urge, she found, had not quite died out. It reminded her of her younger years, when she didn’t have to deal with the whims of an emperor who refused to see his own failings. “We already know an ordinary robeast will never be enough to challenge a fully realized Voltron formation,” she reminded him, and not for the first time. “It will have tired them, and I will be able to use the data from the battle to aid in designing the next generation.” She spoke slowly, enunciating each word like she was talking to a child. (Which, in a very real sense, she was.)

Zarkon shot her a look of thin patience, then strode forward, down a flight of steps to a platform engraved with a druidic circle. “You keep speaking of your plans for a second generation, Haggar. I think it’s time to put it to the test.”

“Sire--”

Zarkon cut her off with a gesture, and Haggar ground her teeth, scarcely containing a growl of frustration. She could have listed a dozen reasons why they should not test the new vessel yet, but she knew Zarkon wouldn’t have listened to her. Not even the fact that she hadn’t yet perfected the psychic defenses. A strong enough blow from Voltron could still kill Zarkon—though in all honesty, Haggar might prefer that. Taking direct command would leave her less time for her scholarly pursuits, but it might be worth it to stabilize the empire.

It was just as well she’d already begun construction on a second prototype.

With a sigh, Haggar took her place at the edge of the circle, equidistant from the other druids who would assist her. The procedure required five of them, each focusing wholly on Zarkon’s Quintessence. He stood already in his place at the center of the circle on a raised platform—always above her, always.

“Begin the procedure,” Zarkon said.

* * *

Shiro’s mind was scattered in all directions when the first attack came.

He crouched behind Pidge and Hunk, staring down at a ring of Galra who held a milky pink sphere the size of a watermelon. It had the smooth, opalescent quality of a fine pearl, and it seemed to glow faintly from within. Unease churned in Hunk’s gut, echoed by Pidge’s suspicion. Neither of them liked the way Vanda smiled when she ran her claws across the pearl’s surface.

He stood behind Val and Nyma in the cockpit of the _Harbinger_ and saw around him a shadow of another cockpit—smaller, darker—where Akira sat at the controls. They were still engaged with the rest of Zarkon’s fleet, aided now by reinforcements from Earth and Kera alike. He felt surprise, and not a small portion of unease, from Val and Nyma when they recognized his presence, but from Akira—only recognition.

He ran with Keith and Lance through the depths of Zarkon’s ship, anticipation singing in his blood as the electric charge of Quintessence built in the air. They were close, now, to the next circle of druids. Only two circles remained, and Keith’s body reverberated with the high stakes. They shared a glance as they approached the hangar door, grinned, and hardly slowed as Lance shot out the door controls. Together they burst into the room beyond, and--

Pain.

He felt it, first, from the other paladins. From Matt and Shay and Meri and Ryner. From Allura—god, _Allura_. It was a paralyzing pain, the kind of agony that locked joints and froze the mind, until all they could focus on was the point of impact, a starburst radiating pain down their spines.

He saw it next, and he saw it through Akira’s eyes, with Akira’s raw terror coursing through his body.

A new robeast, made to look like the Black Lion—if the Black Lion had been dipped in tar, every inch of her painted a deep, dimensionless black, except for the red on her wings, a pair of yellow eyes on her chest, and the violet glow of corrupted Quintessence where Black glowed with a brighter blue light. The false Black Lion's mouth was open, the back of its throat still glowing red-hot from the laser it had fired into the back of Voltron’s neck, at the base of the Black Lion's skull.

 _You are not worthy to lead Voltron,_ Zarkon’s voice whispered in Shiro's ear. _If your lion cannot see that, then perhaps it is time I replace it with a newer model._

In the next instant, Voltron was ripped apart, and all the pain Shiro had felt through his friends crashed down on him, plunging him beneath the surface of a cold, inky blackness.

* * *

The air left Thace’s lungs in a rush as one of Dez’s men slammed him up against the wall. _Vrekking zikta, woman,_ he thought, spitting out a mouthful of blood as he slashed at the man’s neck, opening up a space just wide enough to slip through. _You train these people too well._

He could hear Dez behind him somewhere, shouting orders. Almost he could convince himself he knew which lasers were hers—the ones that singed his fur and managed, just barely, not to do any real damage. Hers wouldn’t be the ones going far wide, striking the ceiling or skimming along the walls like the tails of comets passing in the night. Nor would they be the handful that managed to hit him, little starbursts of pain across his shoulders and down the backs of his legs that compounded as his armor weakened under the barrage.

Thace didn’t _think_ any of those were Dez’s, anyway. He was fairly certain when she shot in earnest she would go for his head. Instant death was the only way to play this.

She still hadn’t taken that route, though, despite her men cutting off Thace’s path to the first shuttle bay. Thace’s wounds were beginning to slow him—his frostbitten toes flaring pain with every step, his shoulder screaming every time he was forced into combat with one of his pursuers, his head pounding in time with his racing pulse. His vision was still fuzzy, his right eye nearly useless. And his ears kept replaying the blare of alarms that, he thought, had died out some time ago.

One of Dez’s soldiers put on a burst of speed, cutting Thace off at the next intersection, and Thace veered toward a side passage. The world seemed to tilt as he did so, and he slammed against the wall, feeling the impact in his whole body.

He would have appreciated a hint of some sort from Dez, as long as she insisted on prolonging his torment. (It was a foolish, self-piteous thought unworthy of an agent of the Accords. She’d already offered him more help than she should; if he couldn’t figure a way out on his own, he deserved to die.)

Thinking was hard, between the headache, the lasers seeking his heart, the roar of voices all around. He made himself think anyway. There had to be something. Some chance, some gamble. Some…

Dez’s personal shuttle.

The epiphany hit him so hard he almost stopped running there in the center of the hall. Dez, like all members of the Galra command, had a private hangar where she kept a shuttle for personal use—small, limited in capacity, but with a wormholer, which was all Thace really needed.

And, of course, he was heading entirely the wrong direction.

Well, not _entirely_. His last turn had taken him the wrong way, but before that… Thace had to hand it to Dez. He’d heard her hissing orders to her men, had come face-to-face with her twice so far when she sprinted ahead to plant herself in his path. He’d thought it all part of the act, but—no. She’d been herding him toward her hangar, all the while making it look like he was choosing his own path.

Damn her.

The corridor curved to the left up ahead, a long, gentle turn that followed the ship’s hull. He could continue on that way, and it would eventually loop back around to where he wanted to be, but his steps were already flagging, his legs quaking from exertion. This chase was going to be over soon, one way or another. So he gathered himself for one last ploy, and when he reached the bend in the corridor, he kept running, grasping at the wall with his toes, letting his momentum carry him halfway up the wall. He ran two steps, three, the curve of the wall aiding his climb. When he felt himself begin to slow, he kicked off, one foot lashing out as he flipped around.

His heel caught the first soldier in the nose, and he scrambled up her as she toppled, gaining her shoulders and leaping off to sail over the heads of the next several soldiers. He landed near Dez, their eyes locking for a moment. Her face was twisted into a mask of fury, but there was strain around her eyes that came from genuine concern, and her worry warmed Thace as he struck down the last two stragglers and took off back the way he’d come.

Dez may have trained her men well, but Thace’s sudden reversal had left them floundering, and Thace was already back to the last intersection before he heard the telltale sounds of pursuit. He pushed himself faster, gulping in air as his body edged closer to its limit, every muscle quivering with the strain.

He didn’t slow when he reached the door of Dez’s hangar, only palmed the lock and continued on, his shoulder slamming against the door as it slid aside. His wound there flared, making it suddenly difficult to draw breath, but he could see Dez’s ship now, tantalizingly close. He charged up the ramp, ducking as laserfire nipped at his heels. In the cockpit, he barely had the presence of mind to insert the red data chip he carried, which would make it appear as though he'd falsified Dez's credentials rather than simply using the passkey she'd shared with him. He figured it was the least he could do after she'd spared his life.

He fired the engines before the program had fully run its course, blasting out of the hangar into open space and immediately opening a wormhole to randomized coordinates. He plunged in with no thought for what he might find on the other side.

* * *

Lance kept his finger on the trigger, hardly pausing to aim as he shot again and again and again at the semicircle of druids going after Keith. “Frickin’ Keith,” he grumbled to himself, shooting at the hag trying to blast Keith with black lightning. “Always charging in like an asshole and trying to get himself killed.” Lance managed to put down the druid attacking Keith with magic, only to have one of the others teleport in close while Keith was trying to recover, kick him in the gut, and send him skidding backward. Lance’s heart leaped into his throat, and he swung his bayard around, chasing the druid down as he teleported rapid-fire around the hangar. “Damn stupid asshole Keith. No, no, it’s all right, I’ll take care of them, Keith, you just go and take a nap or some shit, no big deal.”

Keith scrambled to his feet once more, charging forward. He’d abandoned his shield at some point, opting to go sword-and-dagger for this fight, because that was a smart move when you were dealing with magic, oh yeah. He charged in, favoring his left leg slightly, and shifted course at the last second so that when the druid teleported again to avoid Lance’s shot, he appeared directly between Keith’s two blades.

Keith struck lightning-fast, spraying a streak of violet blood across the floor as he yanked his blades free, and twisted to glare at Lance. “I can hear you, you know.”

“Good,” Lance said, forcing levity. “Then how about you listen and try not to get yourself killed?”

With a snort, Keith turned and charged the last druid, who panicked and lashed out with yellow lightning. Lance shot the instant the magic appeared—he’d discovered, over the course of the last two fights, that druids couldn’t fling lightning and teleport simultaneously. It meant that Keith charging in and making them impusle-cast was actually not a terrible strategy, except that it totally _was_ , and if this weren’t the last circle they had to take out before they could hightail it back to the (relative) safety of their lions, then Lance would have grabbed Keith by his stupid fluffy ear and sent him to the corner for time-out before he pushed himself too far and left Lance to carry his literal dead weight. Lance shouldn't have had to deal with the fallout of his recklessness.

Or maybe it was just that Keith had this way of gasping when he got hurt: real soft, like he was trying not to show weakness but couldn’t quite stop that first knee-jerk reaction. Every time Lance heard it—and he’d heard it enough for a lifetime in the thirty minutes they’d been here, challenging druids and tearing through sentries in the hallways—he felt like somebody had taken an ice pick to his sternum. Every time Keith hit the floor, Lance faltered, looking on in breathless horror until Keith moved.

Keith hadn’t said it in so many words, but he was turning himself into a meat-shield for Lance, throwing himself out there as bait, and for all it gave Lance the perfect opening to take out their targets, he still would have said fuck it all if he could just get Keith to chill and realize, _hey, maybe it’s not a great idea to let the enemy slowly siphon away my Quintessence._

They'd stuck close together when they weren’t actively fighting Galra, trying to give Keith’s body every opportunity to leech off of Lance’s Quintessence, but it was a slow process that neither of them knew how to expedite. Lance would put good money on Keith’s fatigue being a hell of a lot more serious than he was letting on—especially with the way his eyes seemed to be slowly dimming as the battle progressed.

“You’re going in a cryopod as soon as we get back to the castle,” Lance muttered, dismissing his bayard once he’d swept the room one last time. He mentally unmuted the comms, grimacing at the confusion of voices competing for attention on the other end of the line. “I think that’s the last of them. Anyone see any more--”

Keith gave a strangled gasp, killing the words on Lance’s tongue. He spun, summoning his bayard even before he saw the druid standing before Keith, one hand wrapped around his throat and crackling with violet energy. Keith grimaced, clawing at the woman’s hand as he struggled to find his footing.

“Well, well, well.” The druid's voice was soft and oily, seeming to come from all around as though the room itself were possessed. Lance took aim and fired, his nerves too frazzled to listen to a monologue, but his laser stopped in midair, shattering into a rain of glitter a full foot from the woman’s head. She chuckled, tilting her head until the yellow glow visible through the eyeholes of her mask was peering straight into Lance’s eyes. “I’m not going to give up my prize that easily, paladin.”

“Prize?” Lance hissed, sighting along his barrel as the woman lifted Keith higher. His feet left the ground, and his eyes widened, both hands now clutching at the woman’s wrist in a desperate attempt to alleviate the pressure on his neck.

“Yes.” The druid’s voice thrummed with pleasure, and Lance didn’t need to see her face to know she was smiling. “The traitorous prince. Lord Zarkon has promised quite the reward for whoever brings him your head—twice that if you’re still alive.” She leaned close to Keith, her voice dropping low. “He means to make an example of you, you know. I can’t wait to hear you scream.”

* * *

The bridge of the Castle of Lions was a chaotic swirl of multi-colored light: the blue-white flicker of lasers, the red pulse of failing shields, the blue-red-green of holographic displays spewing too many reports for any Altean to keep up with. Wyn didn’t know how Coran was managing it all, honestly. From his station at the back of the bridge, Wyn was mostly shielded from the chaos. He just had the shifting lights painting the top of his control panel and the rush of voices all around. He kept waiting for Rowan to say something, but Rowan wasn't here now. It was just Wyn.

“No—yes, thank you, sir, that’s--” The human woman who sat in at the black paladin’s station sounded tired, her short, dull-colored hair sticking up at odd angles from all the times she’d run her fingers through it.

She still had her communicator pressed to her ear, which was a funny way to use the comms, but the other human, the one at the yellow paladin station, didn’t seem to find it all that strange. Maybe that was just how Earth comms worked. It  _had_ taken an awful lot of fuss to get the device to talk to the castle, but the humans insisted "phone calls" were the only way to talk to the rest of their people.

“If you can spare anyone else, the help would be more than appreciated," the woman was saying. "No—no, the, ah… The friendly extraterrestrials are making considerable strides, from what I can see, but, sir, with all due respect, you aren’t out here. You can’t see the sheer numbers we’re up against.”

She paused, pulling her hand away from her eyes to give the other human a look. The man—he had to be Hunk’s family; they looked very much alike, even if this man was quite a bit smaller—quirked a smile, but the rapid patter of his fingers on the triggers never slowed. He still had the feed from the main forward recorder playing at his station, but he’d stopped narrating the battle a while ago to join Wyn on drone duty.

Beyond the humans were Coran, Tev, and Zelka, all of them talking together in low, crisp voices. They didn’t sound too different from the way they normally were in battle, but Wyn could feel the tense crackle of Quintessence that said they were all scared.

The paladins' voices on the comms had mostly faded to white noise as they coordinated their assault on the robeast—not something Wyn wanted to see. It was--

( _familiar_ )

\--too much.

So he closed his eyes, and breathed, and listened to the comforting rhythm of Coran’s voice, and tried not to remember the fuzzy, weightless feeling of plugging into a robeast shell.

No. What?

Wyn's chest went tight as memories fluttered around his head. His memories? No. No, those couldn't be his memories. Something about them felt...

Strange.

Tev cheered when they killed the robeast. Zelka and Coran breathed a sign of relief. The paladins were more subdued, but even there Wyn heard currents of satisfaction.

Wyn hugged his knees closer to his chest and smothered the voice that asked whether they all would have cheered his death, if Lance hadn’t found him when he did.

 _That’s different,_  he said to no one.

But was it different? Was it really? He was a robeast, same as whichever prisoner they’d made that shell for. Just because Wyn had caused enough trouble to slow down his progress didn’t mean the ones with weaker Quintessence didn’t deserve to live.

Wyn curled tighter around his legs, letting go of his drone controls to press his hands to his ears to shut out the foreign memories and the voice that sounded too much like his own. _S_ _hut up._ His fingers found the scars on his scalp and, before he could think better of it, he traced the marks left by the robeast link, burned into his skin when, in a panic, he’d overloaded the system.

_(monster. that’s all you are, you know. a monster.)_

Wyn yanked his hand away, swallowing a cry of frustration. _S_ _hut up shut up shut_ _**up**._

The sudden silence that descended on the bridge was enough to rip Wyn out of his thoughts. His head snapped up, and he opened his eyes expecting to see that his technopathy had gotten away from him again. ( _no--no, he wouldn't--he was better than that_ ) But no one was looking at him. They all stared, horrified, at the forward viewscreen. On the comms, all Wyn could hear was breathing, quick and shallow the way Wyn’s got when the experiments wormed their way into his head ( _he was better. he was. he could control it now, better than he’d controlled it back then_ )

“Shiro?”

That was Allura’s voice, and she sounded scared. More scared than she should.

Wyn didn’t have a good view of the battle from where he sat—he’d picked this place for that very reason, and for the fact that he could feel the Blue Lion better from here than from anywhere else. Feeling sick to his stomach, he reached out and turned his drone toward where Voltron had been fighting the robeast, afraid of what he’d find.

A second Black Lion drifted behind Voltron, which had gone rigid. Even as Wyn watched, fissures of light spread out at the places where the lions joined together. The breathing on the comms grew louder, and other people said Shiro’s name—but he wasn’t answering. Wyn remembered that day in the Arena, Shiro standing over him, racing toward him, falling to the ground, bleeding. ( _his_ _fault_ ) He remembered Shiro’s strength, and he remembered Shiro’s hesitation on the day they’d reunited, after the other paladins took Shiro back from Haggar.

Why wasn’t he answering?

 _(you know why_.)

Wyn wasn’t a child; he’d seen death. He’d seen his parents die. ( _his_ _fault_ ) He’d seen the Balmeran die in the Arena, killed because Haggar had turned them into a monster, the same way she’d turned Wyn into a monster.

He knew what death was, and he knew that it could happen to anyone.

But not to Shiro.

( _please_ )

Wyn was on his feet before he could trace the path of his thoughts to its end. The humans made confused sounds as he passed, but neither of them moved to stop him. Tev saw him next, and glanced nervously at Coran, trying a few times to say something. Then came Coran, and he, finally, moved like he was going to pull Wyn back from the open area at the center of the bridge, where Wyn could see battle in all directions. Flashing lights seared his eyes, and his skin crawled with the feeling of Coran’s Quintessence curling against his spine as Coran reached out a hand.

( _don’t_ )

Coran faltered, and Wyn didn’t stop to wonder why. The lights around him were flickering now, a different pattern than what the battle gave off. He heard Zelka cry out, heard Tev curse. Something snapped, the sound sharp and hot and painful and close enough to make Wyn flinch.

He continued on anyway, his eyes riveted to the two Black Lions. One drifted through space, her eyes dark, the other lions swarming around her as the voices of the paladins shouted at the edge of his awareness, calling out plans, crying out for everyone to protect Allura. Protect Shiro. Protect Allura. Protect Shiro.

Wyn lifted his hand, and was surprised when his fingers met the smooth, cold surface of the viewscreen. He stood among the stars, nothing beneath him but blackness, nothing around but the flickering pulse of Quintessence as it ran through ships, through lasers, though lions. Through the second Black Lion, dark and twisted and quivering with an energy that reminded Wyn too much of drifting in the link with his own robeast.

( _stop_ )

Wyn fell forward, stars swirling around him, ships frozen mid-flight. He could track the progress of lasers as they swept past him, but he ignored them all, stretching his awareness toward the second Black Lion. It had to stop. He had to stop it. He had to protect Shiro, as Shiro had protected him all those months ago.

For a moment, he met resistance. Then he was inside the robeast, his mind flickering through the machinery, swirling in the central computer, spreading, learning, adapting. He knew how this thing worked. He knew how to take it apart. He knew--

He was not alone.

Who--?

A presence coiled around him, cold as the depths of space, and Wyn was almost thrown from the robeast in that first instant. He was keenly aware of his own body, every inch of him shaking as the Other hammered at his mind and tried to crush him under the weight of his Quintessence. The Other didn't want him there. The Other wanted him gone, so he could turn the weight of his Quintessence on the Black Lion.

Wyn thought of Shiro, and held on.

* * *

Allura looked up from Shiro’s rigid form as a silent scream tore through the cockpit. She could _feel_ Zarkon hovering over her, pressing at her bond with Shiro and with the Black Lion, clawing his way in. But then, he just—stopped.

Outside, the false Lion had gone still, drifting across Allura’s field of view. Black electricity crackled at the joints, and Zarkon’s presence faltered, something very much like fear coloring his presence.

“Nnngh… Allura?”

Allura gave a start at the sound of Shiro’s voice, staring down at him as he began to stir. The Black Lion gave a rumble that made Allura’s knees weak. “You’re okay,” she said, the words as much exclamation as reassurance. “You’re okay.”

Shiro lifted a hand to his head, his eyes hazy, another groan slipping past him. Outside the cockpit, Allura could hear the others crying out as Zarkon’s lion continued to drift, twitching occasionally like it was fighting against some form of restraints.

“This is our chance!” Matt cried. “Get him away from the Black Lion!”

Meri roared an agreement, and together she and Shay towed the false Lion away. It thrashed, one massive paw striking Blue in the eyes, its head twisting the other way and unleashing a laser that clipped Yellow’s ear.

Shiro hauled himself upright, reaching out for the controls.

“Slowly,” Allura told him, grabbing his arm to steady him.

He smiled at her, the expression strained. “I’ll be okay.” He flipped a switch on the console, reconnecting to the open comms channel. “Don’t let up, guys,” he said, his voice laced with weariness. “We’re right behind you.”

* * *

“Put me through to Emperor Zarkon,” Vanda said. Her voice reverberated in the open chamber above the pit, the echos making Hunk feel impossibly small. “Tell him Lady Haggar was right. We’ve found it.”

Hunk glanced at Pidge, unease curling in his gut. There was something about the weird pearly thing Vanda had pulled out of the ground—the way it glowed in the crystallight, or maybe the way it seemed bigger than it actually was. It was probably Hunk’s imagination. Dark tunnels, pounding adrenaline, and echoing voices didn’t exactly make for a clear head. But in the instant before the pearl had come into view, Hunk had almost though he’d heard—not a _voice_ , exactly, but something similar. Intelligence. Awareness. Something like what he’d felt from the Yellow Lion the first time he’d met her, before they’d forged their bond. Something like what he’d felt from Shay’s Balmera. A sound—kind of.

“I don’t like this,” Pidge muttered. They were still perched high up along the rock wall, folded into a small hollow in the stone.

“Me either,” Hunk admitted. “But what do we do?”

Pidge hesitated, and Hunk wondered whether they were having the same internal argument he was. He figured when you saw an alien carrying around something weird and potentially dangerous, there were two distinct possibilities: “smash the mystery sphere,” or “whatever you do, don’t smash the mystery sphere.” And Hunk would _really_ rather not blow himself up when his moms were up on the castle-ship waiting for him to come home.

There was a quiet beep over the comms, and a faint blue glow appeared in the crevice Pidge had wedged themself into. “Huh.”

“Huh?” Hunk echoed. “What does that mean? What are you—what, do you know what that thing is?”

“I… _no_.” Pidge sounded utterly dumbstruck, their words coming slow. The blue light flickered a few times. Hunk shot a look at Vanda’s small crew, just to be sure none of them had noticed. “I’m looking at the scans, Hunk, and this thing, it’s… I can’t see it.”

Hunk frowned. “Okay, well, what kind of scans are you looking at?”

“ _Everything._ ” Pidge’s voice was shaking now, which made Hunk’s pulse quicken in sympathy. “BLIP-tech, comms, material composition… It’s like this thing doesn’t exist. It’s got no vital signs, it’s not sending or receiving any signals, and—what the hell?”

“Talk to me, Pidge.”

Pidge muttered a few curses, then huffed a short, sharp breath. “I need you to check your suit’s scanners for me, Hunk. I think mine might be busted.”

Hunk wasn’t sure what he was doing, exactly, but he pulled up the scans anyway, ducking behind a rocky outcropping so the glow of his gauntlet didn’t show. It took just a few seconds to run the scans, and then he checked them, looking for any signs of what might have freaked Pidge out this much. “I don’t see anything, Pidge.”

“Nothing?”

“No.” Hunk closed his eyes, shaking his head a few times to clear it. “No, Pidge, I don’t see anything. It’s just a blank screen, like—Wait.” Hunk opened his eyes and stared again at the readout, which showed an open field of blue. He switched from BLIP-tech to comms. Nothing. From comms to material composition. From material composition to air quality. It flashed a warning— _No Atmosphere Detected._ “What?” Hunk breathed.

“Right?”

“What the hell?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Hey, Coran?”

* * *

Coran curtailed a burst of profanity as Pidge’s voice came on the comms, but only by a narrow margin. He knelt beside Wyn, holding the boy as he screamed, his body rigid in Coran’s arm. Quintessence streamed off him in such quantities it was very nearly visible, and dense enough to make Coran’s skin tingle. His eyes, bloodshot and distant, stared out at the motionless false Lion as the other paladins closed ranks between it and the Black Lion. Shiro was stirring now, his voice still weak, his questions slow in coming.

A pinprick of yellow light showed in the pupils of Wyn’s eyes. His lips were stained red with blood where he’d bit down when the episode had hit.

Pidge’s voice faltered as they took in the chaos. Coran had noticed they’d been quiet—they’d probably silenced the comms so they wouldn’t be distracted as they tailed Vanda, and now--

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Coran said quickly, forcing a smile into his voice. “Has something happened on your end?”

“Yeah, uh… that’s what we’re trying to figure out. You ever come across something that knocks out, like, every kind of scan? Like, a big pinkish sphere, about the size of your head?”

Coran stopped breathing. “What?”

“So… that sounds like you _do_ know what it is,” Hunk said. “Should we be worried?”

Memories flashed through Coran’s head, images of carnage. Blood slicking the inside of cryopods. The Blue Lion torn nearly in two.

_Impossible._

“Coran…?” Pidge asked.

In his arms, Wyn gave a gasp, then fell silent, his eyes rolling.

Coran cursed. “I can’t be sure what it is,” he said.

“But you--”

“It reminds me of something from ten thousand years ago. Something Zarkon _himself_ eradicated. There’s no way one of those things survived this long.”

Outside, the Blue Lion faltered. “Wait a minute,” Meri said. “What are you talking about? What’s going on down there?”

“Vanda found something,” Pidge said.

“It’s _nothing_ ,” Coran said. Inside, his mind was screaming with primal terror, but he kept his voice firm. There was _too. much._ going on right now to get distracted by something that was not an immediate threat—and this thing Vanda had found, even if it was by some impossibility the same thing that had birthed so many nightmares ten thousand years ago.. It was not as pressing a concern as the false Lion that had begun to work through the paralysis that had seized it, paralysis Coran could only assume had something to do with Wyn’s technopathy.

Coran breathed deeply, forcing himself to remain calm.

“Meri, there’s nothing you can do right now. You all need to finish your own fight. Pidge...” He swallowed. “Don’t let Vanda get away with that thing, whatever you do. Destroy it if you can, steal it if you can’t. Just—don’t let it fall into Zarkon’s hands.”

“Right...” Pidge sounded less than certain about that, but they didn’t argue, and they didn’t ask for an explanation. “We’ll let you know how that goes.”

* * *

“First and third squad, fall back,” Akira barked, dipping his right wing down and spiraling to the far side of the _Harbinger_ to take out a squad of gunners that were hounding her. Val flashed him a thumbs-up on the video link, and Akira nodded back, even as his eyes darted back to the screen showing the positions of all his troops. “Fifth squad, regroup with first and third and bolster the castle’s defenses. Looks like the enemy’s going to try to swarm them. Second squad, hold where you are. We’ve got reinforcements from the _Kera_ headed your way. Fourth squad, you’re with my team. We’re making a run on the command ship.”

There was a momentary lull in the translations skittering out to the different squads—grouped by country and by common language, but numbered for efficiency’s sake. The battle had expanded as they fought. Half of Anamuri’s forces had formed a line between Zarkon’s ships and the Earth, and the rest of the battle was slowly spreading outward from there.

“I think you might have broken them,” Val muttered. She’d found a way to set her mic to a private frequency so only Akira and the paladins could hear her and, in all honestly, Akira was jealous. He had a few choice things he’d like to say, if he could be sure it wouldn’t shatter the fragile resolve of the human forces.

Instead, he just shot Val a quelling look and kicked the inspiration into overdrive. Command, he was realizing, was more than the strategies and code words he'd helped Takashi study back in their cadet days. More and more, he found himself falling back on the combination of white lies and forced confidence he'd employed as a flight instructor. “My team will take point. The rest of you, keep the little guys off our tail. We go in, hit their long-range guns, and fall back. The Kera forces will do the same from the opposite side. Stick close and you’ll be fine.”

That last part was a bald-faced lie, especially when ten of his fifty ships had already been shot down. The Galra quite simply had them outgunned. No human-built shield could stand up to those lasers.

But these pilots were professionals, and they’d come up here ready to put their life on the line. Akira glanced to the video feed connecting him to the leader of the alien team who would be making the run with them. It said something about his day so far that he’d set aside the fact that his comrade looked like a smiling feathered dinosaur who trilled as she led her team in.

Akira laughed incredulously, then turned and streaked toward the heart of the enemy forces. “Let’s go!”

Akira’s ship continued to surprise him. It was faster than anything he’d ever touched, steadier than the best the Garrison had to offer. The windshield automatically flagged threats for him, and the shields deflected those shots he couldn’t avoid outright, which was fewer than he would have thought possible. He was keenly aware of Squad Two behind him in their Kono-49s. They were smaller, weaker, and more fragile than what Akira flew, but their pilots didn’t waver for a second. Akira didn’t know their names, but he felt an intense flare of pride for their courage, and he pushed himself faster, taking out ships as he careened toward the turrets on Zarkon’s ship.

Let the army come for him. If it bought his men even a single extra breath, it was worth the risk.

Akira howled, and explosions blossomed across the flagship’s hull.

* * *

Hunk met Pidge’s eyes, his bayard materializing in his hand. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

They took another second to fix the position of Vanda’s squad in their minds—two Galra still climbing out of the pit where the pearl had been, two sentries flanking Vanda herself, and the soldier standing opposite her, the pearl cradled in the palms of her hands.

Hunk moved first, roaring a challenge and opening fire as he stepped out from behind his cover. The sentries turned toward him, scarcely managing to raise their rifles before Hunk’s lasers shredded through their metal skin. Unfortunately, Vanda and her companion were faster. Vanda pressed a button on her armor, and a large, spherical shield sprang into being. The woman holding the pearl ducked down behind Vanda.

The other two Galra dropped below the lip of the crater, out of reach of Hunk’s gun, but Pidge was already running for them, bayard burning a neon green crescent through the gloom. They fired it at the ceiling, swung out over the pit, then released, dropping in an arc that dipped below Hunk’s line of sight. He heard a grunt, a clatter, a burst of laser fire, and then a scream that cut off with a gruesome _thud._

“Go,” Vanda hissed, shoving the woman behind her toward the dark opening of a tunnel at the far side of this chamber. “The egg is the most important thing.”

_Egg?_

Hunk didn’t have time to dwell on the revelation. Vanda charged toward him, her shield deflecting his shots at odd angles. Hunk realized too late that she didn’t mean to slow, and she slammed into him as he tried to summon his shield. The impact left him dazed, chest burning as he skidded across the ground and hit a stone outcropping.

“Pidge.” The word came out strangled, his lungs screaming for air as he tried to recover from Vanda’s hit. He coughed, gasped in a lungful of air, and raised his shield as Vanda drew back a rapier—slimmer than any Galra blade he’d ever seen—and brought it down toward his face. “Pidge!” Hunk screamed, turning the blade aside. He spun, knocking Vanda’s legs out from under her, and scrambled to his feet. “Pidge, she’s getting away!”

He’d lost sight of the soldier who’d taken the pearl, her footsteps already swept away by the sound of Vanda’s strangled roar as she surged after Hunk and by Pidge’s stifled cursing from the pit. A laser struck the ceiling, followed soon after by the tip of Pidge’s bayard.

Vanda swung again for Hunk’s head, and Hunk had sparred with Keith often enough to see her inexperience. She wasn’t a warrior—not by Galra standards, certainly. She had the strength for it, and she wasn’t exactly clueless, but her attacks lacked grace and precision. Hunk grabbed her wrist as the next thrust came.

They locked eyes for an instant, and all Hunk could think was, _This is the woman who stuffed Val full of crystals._ He wondered whether she’d had a hand in the experiments on Vel-17, too.

Hunk lifted her easily, throwing her over his shoulder. She landed hard, rolled, and scrambled to get her feet under her.

Before she managed it, Hunk had his bayard in his hands. He opened fire, and this time there was no shield to stop the lasers from tearing through her body. She hit the ground silently, shuddered, and went still. Hunk’s bayard dissolved in a flash of light as Pidge zipped up and over the lip of the chasm. There was blood on their armor and strain around their eyes, and Hunk wondered whether they were thinking the same thing he was—they were both going to have to face their mothers after this.

Pidge touched down lightly, already pulling up a screen on their gauntlet. “Which way?” they demanded, running toward the far side of the chamber. Three dark openings stared back at them, and they turned, frantic eyes searching Hunk’s. “Which way, Hunk? Where’d she go?”

“On the right,” Hunk said. He shook his head and tried to make himself follow after Pidge, but his feet felt like lead, and he couldn’t make himself remember how to summon his bayard. Vanda was dead. He didn’t regret that. Couldn’t. But he didn’t want to see his moms’ faces when he told them what he’d done.

Pidge’s curses drifted back toward him, a tangle of frustration and adrenaline. Hunk quickened his pace and caught up to them where the tunnel split off in four directions. Pidge was tapping furiously at their suit’s readout, hand shaking. “Goddamnit,” they hissed. “She has the pearl.”

“Pidge--”

“She has the pearl, Hunk,” they snapped. “We can’t track her.”

Oh.

Hunk stared at Pidge, his heart sinking. They couldn’t track the soldier who’d escaped. And in the caverns, which were hard enough already to navigate, there would be no chance of following her. Grimacing, Hunk laid a hand on Pidge’s shoulder. “We’ll figure it out,” he said.

Pidge only swore again, ripping off their helmet and running a shaking hand through their hair. Hunk gave their arm a tug, and they fell against him, going boneless as soon as he took their weight.

“It’ll be fine,” he told them, wishing he could believe it. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

* * *

Shiro could feel Zarkon.

It was a dark cloud hanging over his consciousness, a pressure at the base of his skull—not the haze he’d felt in the instant Haggar took him over, or the warm connection he felt with Allura and Black. More like someone taking a baseball bat to his head.

He slid easily into the paladin bond, taking strength from Allura and Black and lending his own in turn. Allura’s head was pounding nearly as much as his, though she’d fared better in the initial attack that had forced the lions apart. And Black—Black was terrified, every conduit alive with fear and pain as Zarkon tried to claw his way back inside her mind. She’d already severed that connection, but Zarkon had never been one to take no for an answer. Not when he was a youth demanding a place in the Voltron Guard, not when he was a man demanding his rightful station at the head of Voltron. Once Black had taken that for decisiveness. Once, perhaps, it had _been_ decisiveness, blended with a touch of benign stubbornness. But it had grown over the years into a seething mass of arrogance and entitlement.

_Quintessence._

They couldn’t hear Zarkon’s thoughts, but they could sense his desire—and his desire was wholly bent on the Black Lion’s Quintessence. The lions’ Quintessence, Allura had once explained, was the source of their powers. It was their life, their very soul, and Zarkon needed that if he wanted to perfect his own version of the Black Lion.

Shiro tightened his grip on the controls, pressing forward into the ring the others had formed around Zarkon’s lion to add his strength to theirs. _I won’t let him take you,_ Shiro promised Black. Allura echoed the sentiment, her body swaying as she clung to her controls.

Zarkon’s attack had hit them all hard, and not just physically. Allura sensed a drop in their Quintessence, something Shiro could only parse as a kind of spiritual attack—will against will, bypassing both body and mind to strike at the very core of him. He thought they might all have been overrun, Zarkon’s Quintessence was so strong (strong enough to frighten Allura; stronger than the Black Lion had ever felt from him before.)

Then something had changed, and Zarkon had faltered.

Allura’s mind flickered toward the bridge of the Castle of Lions, and for a moment the image of Coran cradling a trembling Wyn, his brown skin ashen and beaded with sweat, was superimposed on the battle outside. Technopathy, Coran had called it. This seemed far beyond the scope of mere technopathy. Whatever Wyn had done, it had ripped Zarkon’s mind away from the Black Lion. He’d regained some control of his own false Lion by now, though his mind was distant—still questing toward Shiro, toward Black, but hardly a trickle compared to the tsunami it had been before.

“We have to end this,” Shiro said. He hated the way his body dragged, but there was nothing he could do and no chance in hell that he would back down. “Before Zarkon is back to full strength.”

Allura’s stance firmed, her fingers curling around her pedestals. “We need Voltron.”

The others’ minds reacted at once, concern fluttering across the void between lions for just an instant before Shiro projected his own calm. He was tired, and he was aching, but he could endure. They just had to be fast. Slowly, the others assented. First Ryner, then Shay. Meri and Matt’s concern persisted longer, and both Shiro and Allura smiled in response.

Closing his eyes, Shiro saw a faint flicker of stars, of water underfoot. The Heart of the Lion, Allura had called it. And on the horizon, something like a sunset—all blazing colors and fervent heat. Shiro reached toward it and found Matt within.

_Together._

Matt’s heat and light coursed through Shiro, instilling his body with new energy, as something cool and soothing rushed into him through Allura. Meri. Her mind bubbled with laughter, with wonder, and he felt keenly her pleasure at the connection—less frightening than it had been the last time, now that she knew better than to fear that she would make it fall apart.

Shay (strong, solid, unrelenting, frightened of the battle but unashamed to hold Hunk's home and her own in the same regard) and Ryner (quick, flexible, ruthless, already measuring the destructive potential of Zarkon's lion and weighing strategies to bring it down) completed the circle, and Shiro felt his mind expand. He could still sense Zarkon there, just at the edge of his awareness. Through Shiro, the others could sense him also. They recoiled, and Shiro nearly did the same. But Allura stood fast, and Meri clung to her, and it was only a moment before the rest of them saw what she was thinking.

 _It is dangerous,_ Ryner thought.

Matt smiled to himself, his bayard already in hand. _When is it not?_

They moved as one, and Voltron bore down on the false Lion, their sword appearing in the Red Lion’s maw and cutting toward the false Lion’s head. Zarkon moved faster, his intent tangible in this space. Shiro pulled the paladins deeper into Black’s awareness, following Allura and guiding her in turn. Through Black’s eyes, they could see the bonds—bonds coursing through their own body, connecting six minds; bonds streaming out across the stars in shimmering trails that led to Hunk and Pidge in the dark below the ground, to Nyma and Val in their ship, weaving together with Akira as they destroyed turret after turret along the length of Zarkon’s flagship, to Keith and Lance, frozen in place, a druid gripping Keith by the throat as electricity wracked his body.

Shiro’s heart beat quicker at the image, but Zarkon wrested his attention back to the battle at hand. Zarkon, and the sickly violet trail fanning out like an oil slick from the flagship to the false lion, from the lion to the heart of Voltron themself. Twined around Zarkon’s bonds, hardly distinguishable from the frosty expanse of the Milky Way in the night sky around them, was Wyn’s blue-white presence. It pierced the false Lion’s, thinning Zarkon’s connection, slowing the lion’s reactions.

Allura sat up straighter, and Shiro saw an instant later what she had.

The bonds.

They weren’t so very different from Quintessence. They _were_ Quintessence, at their foundation, and Allura knew how to shape and direct the flow of Quintessence. With Black, with all of Voltron, perhaps--

They reached out, five lions and six paladins together, and tugged at Zarkon’s bond with his lion. The lion stilled at once, Zarkon’s presence turning frigid. He thrashed, trying to do what he’d done before—only this time, Shiro saw his intent. A burst of Quintessence, delivered to the point where minds met, could disrupt the union.

Perhaps it could do the same to Zarkon.

Allura focused her mind on the tip of the sword, concentrating her own Quintessence at its point as Matt tightened his hold on the hilt. Shay and Meri steeled themselves, waiting for Shiro’s command before they began the charge. Shiro watched, gauging the distance, letting his mind intermingle with Zarkon’s just long enough to see where he meant to go, how he meant to counter.

The false Lion opened its mouth. Light gathered at the back of its throat.

Voltron twisted, Ryner grasping the false Lion’s shoulder. They swung around, Meri and Shay straining for stability as Matt drove the tip of his sword into the lion’s head, where a cockpit would be.

Zarkon’s bond with the lion snapped, the psychic shockwave of it hitting Shiro like a slap to the face and knocking all five lions out of the union. They burst apart, but recovered quickly and rounded on Zarkon’s lion in anticipation of another attack.

But it just drifted, dark-eyed and silent.

* * *

Haggar howled as Zarkon’s body at the center of the druidic circle went limp. He lifted his hand as though to catch himself, and then his eyes fluttered shut. His Quintessence screamed from the shock of the severed bond—not a fatal blow, but near to it.

Before the other druids had even realized what was happening, Haggar had stepped out of the circle, leaving the others to see to the emperor's health. She stood at the edge of the platform, looking out on the battle below. Zarkon’s fleet was in disarray, his heavy artillery drifting like so much salvage. Rebel ships and primitive human vessels pulled together—hurting, yes, but not as much as they should be hurting after taking on the Emperor of the known universe. Much of Zarkon's outer defenses were shredded, many of his strongest vessels reduced to slag by the powerful attacks from the Castle of Lions and the _Hope of Kera,_ the turrets along a broad stretch of the ring shattered by the Guard ships.

“Arrogant fool,” Haggar whispered.

Zarkon, of course, could not hear her. His mind was flayed, his Quintessence in tatters. It would be days before he was in any condition to fight. She’d _told_ him not to force this fight.

But then, when had he ever listened to her?

An alert chimed on Haggar's communicator. She checked it, then turned and headed for the door. “Alert the troops,” she growled. “We’re pulling out.”

Zarkon wouldn’t be happy about it, but Haggar didn’t much care how Zarkon felt. She’d heard the report from Vanda’s team on the ground, the remainder of which had just set down in Hangar Twenty-Four. The Empire had claimed a far greater prize today than one insignificant planet. Let Zarkon return here to soothe his ego after he was done licking his wounds.

Haggar had her eyes set on a much grander prize.

* * *

The druid dragged Keith toward the door, laughing as Keith swung his dagger blindly toward the arm clutching at his throat. She flickered, and the dagger phased through her arm, but the grip on his throat never let up. He swung again, this time for her face, and thrust forward with his sword at the same time.

She caught his right arm in her left and twisted, claws grating against his armor. Keith froze, pain shooting up his arm. He tried to pull free, tried to lean into the druid’s grip to alleviate the pressure, but she didn’t let up. Then, with one swift jerk, something snapped. Keith howled, his sword tumbling from numb fingers. Behind him, Lance screamed something tinged with panic that didn’t quite make it through the swell of pain. The druid leaned close, her cold, featureless mask pressing in close to his face, until all he could see was the smooth polymer and the faint glow through the eye holes. “You should save your strength, traitor. You’re going to need it.”

Keith snarled, biting down on the pain of his broken wrist. “Go to hell.”

The druid tilted her head to the side. A laser from Lance exploded on the shield she’d raised around them, washing the druid’s mask in blue. “A curious expression for a Galra,” she said.

“Yeah? Here’s another: Fuck you.”

Lance let out a laugh, startled and strained, and Keith latched onto it. Staring down a druid, his sword lost, his wrist broken, little twinges of electricity coursing through him every time he fought the druid’s hold, he might have broken if not for the reminder that he wasn’t here alone. So he fought, planting his feet, and spitting in the druid’s face when she tightened her grip on his throat to the point that the edges of his vision began to go dark.

“Just hang on, Keith,” Lance muttered. “I’m going to find a way out of this.”

Keith smiled, though he knew Lance couldn’t see it, and blinked as stars erupted across his field of view. The druid wasn’t much larger than him, but she had an iron grip, and he didn’t doubt she could have carried him across the room in one hand if she’d had a mind to. The claws pressed against his skin were sharp enough to break the skin—in fact, they'd done just that the first time Lance tried to close the distance. Keith could still feel the blood on his throat, hot and sticky and vivid violet where it dotted the sleeve of his armor.

He gasped, lungs burning, and swung again with his dagger, though he knew it would do no good. The dagger passed through the druid’s arm. The hand on his throat tightened. Keith staggered, frustration thickening to cold dread in his chest.

He was going to die.

The light behind him changed, and Lance charged in, swinging his glaive toward the druid’s heart. She phased through it as easily as the dagger, then brought her arm up. Lance managed to place one hand on Keith’s shoulder, as though to pull him free, and then lightning crackled in the space between them, a blistering heat that roared through Keith’s body. His muscled locked up, his vision going white for an instant. When it cleared, Lance was gone, though Keith could hear his ragged breathing somewhere behind him.

The ship lurched.

For a second, Keith thought it was just him—his oxygen-starved brain, his battered and bloodied body. But the druid was stumbling, too, a startled curse escaping her.

“What was that?” Lance asked.

The druid tilted her head to the side and then, slowly, she began to laugh. Keith’s blood ran cold. “Shiro?” he rasped, his voice hardly more than a whisper around the fingers squeezing his throat. “Shiro, what’s happening?”

There was a moment of silence before Shiro spoke, his voice ragged. “They’re pulling back. They—they’ve opened a wormhole.”

“What?” Lance hissed.

The druid was still laughing, the hand at Keith’s neck crackling with electricity. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out. His body tensed, hands clawing at the druid’s arm as she lifted him off the ground. Voices swirled around him, flashing in and out of his awareness before he could identify them.

“Wait… where are they?”

“They’re not still in there, are they?”

“Keith, Lance, you have to get out of there! Get out— _now!_ ”

“Let go of him! Let go of— _Keith!_ ”

“Screw this. I’m coming, Keith, just hold on. Just— _fuck_.”

Light exploded around him, turning his eyelids violet in rapid-fire flashes that left him feeling queasy. He was fading. He knew he was fading. He could feel a cord quivering at the center of his chest, fear and fury reverberating along it as Matt and Red raced toward him, and he knew from the sour-flavored desperation that they were coming from too far away, with too many ships still between them. They weren't going to be fast enough. The flagship... He could see it, already halfway through the wormhole and only gaining speed. He didn’t know if he was looking through Matt’s eyes; he’d never done it outside the Red Lion before. Maybe he was just imagining things.

His mind went calm as the darkness crept in, and all at once he knew how this would play out.

Zarkon wanted Keith. He was a deserter. A traitor. He’d known from the day he chose to side with Shiro that the penalty for that was a slow death. Lance would be a nice bonus—one of the blue paladins, the one who had bested Haggar on her own command ship, who had stolen Wyn from her, who had devised the plan that had freed Shiro and Allura from her clutches. The druid who was squeezing the life out of Keith might not know who Lance was, but if he was still on this ship when the wormhole closed behind it, he _would_ be handed over to Haggar.

The hangar the druids had claimed as their base of operations was simply built, the back wall open to space except for the barrier of artificial atmosphere. All Lance had to do was turn and jump, and he’d be safe. But he wouldn’t. He was still screaming at the druid; Keith could hear his name, raw and agonized on Lance’s tongue as he fired shot after shot after shot, each of them exploding uselessly on the druid’s shield.

 _Go,_ Keith wanted to say. _Your family is waiting for you. Our team needs you._

He already knew what Lance would say, and as much as the knowledge pained him, there was a small, traitorous piece of him that delighted in it.

_I’m not leaving without you, Mullet._

Smiling, Keith flipped his knife around and, before he could regret it, drove it into the hand wrapped around his neck.

The hand bled into smoke. The tip of the knife bit into Keith’s collarbone. He coughed, choking on air and on smoke and on the bright, burning pain at his collar. But he didn’t give himself time to feel it. He just turned and charged toward Lance, shoving him toward the shimmering barrier between the ship’s atmosphere and the vacuum beyond.

Keith saw the relief wash over Lance’s face—and then the horror as smoke drifted into the space between them. The druid solidified, seizing the collar of Keith’s armor and flinging him deeper into the hangar, away from freedom, away from the barrier just as Lance passed through. Matt’s panic spiked, and Keith sent a quiet apology his way.

He landed, sliding toward the far wall, and scrambled upright as the druid chased after him. Keith ducked, slashing at the cloud of semi-solid smoke in a desperate effort to delay the inevitable. The light changed, red and stark black crackling at the edge of the hangar. The wormhole. Keith wondered what would happen to him if he fell out of the ship between one end of the wormhole and the other.

“ _Keith!_ ”

Keith muted his comms on instinct, not wanting to hear the others screaming his name as he was ripped away from them—and it was only after he did so that he realized this scream was not coming from the speaker in his ear. He looked up, eyes locking with Lance’s. Lance had caught himself on the edge of the bay door, one hand curled around the rim, the other still clutching his bayard. His helmet had sealed the instant his suit sensed a vacuum, and a glimmering translucent barrier covered the crack in his armor he’d received from one of the druids.

He looked terrified, his eyes locked on Keith as the boundary of the wormhole drew ever nearer, rippling like the surface of a stormy sea. Keith could see the sea in Matt’s memories, choppy gray water as far as the eye could see, nearly the same color as the horizon. It had been a family trip to the beach, and the downpour had been the only thing that had been able to draw Pidge outside. They’d laughed, dancing through puddles as lightning flashed overhead, and their dad had warned them that they were going to catch a cold—then grabbed Matt and dragged him outside, too, grinning as Matt thrashed and complained about his glasses, about his hair.

 _You only live once, Matty,_ his dad had said. _You have to start collecting memories, or all you'll wind up with are regrets_ _._

_No._

Matt’s realization pounded in Keith’s head. He could see the Red Lion through the barrier, roaring as she chased after Zarkon’s ship, but the wormhole was halfway across the opening now, plunging the room into darkness. It was tangible, dividing the room into the real and the unreal.

No time left.

“Keith...” Lance whispered, paling as the reality of it all finally sunk in.

Keith smiled. “Say goodbye to Shiro and Akira for me?”

He threw his knife before Lance could respond. The blade bit into the back of Lance’s hand, ripping a cry of pain from his lips as his hand spasmed, losing its grip on the hatch. The vacuum caught Lance and he tumbled, his cry severed an instant after it began.

Keith breathed a sigh of relief, but then his breath caught as claws dug into his back, just to the right of his spine. He stiffened, an aborted scream falling from him as the pain washed over him in waves. The darkness was spreading, inside and out, consuming his thoughts, his regrets. Consuming _him_. Keith wondered if he would ever wake up from this darkness. He thought it might be better not to.

“How selfless of you,” the druid whispered, pressing closer against Keith’s back so the claws—white hot claws, claws that seemed to be dripping acid into Keith’s body—burrowed deeper. “Just like your mother.”

Keith managed a weak laugh as the darkness reached him, rippling across his skin like liquid lead as cold as space itself. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” he whispered.

A light whizzed past at the edge of Keith’s vision, bright and blue. It ruffled the druid’s hood as it passed, then hit the wall behind them with a wet sound. Aquamarine light skittered across the surface of the wormhole, pulsing in time with Keith’s pounding heart and tickling at something in Keith’s memory. Sticky bombs, Lance had called them.

A flash, and a roar.

Keith squeezed his eyes shut against the light as the shock wave hit him. For a moment, he lost all sense of direction, his world consumed by the chaos and the pain. He smelled smoke and heat and blood, felt the heavy-cold touch of the wormhole, then--

“Shit.”

Arms, slender and trembling, clutching at his shoulders, at his arm, at his head.

“Shit. No. No, no, no. Keith? Come on, Keith, answer me. Tell me I didn’t just kill you, god _damnit_ , Keith.”

A hand found the wound in his lower back and he writhed, arcing away from the pain. His head felt airy, his body untethered, like he was drifting outside himself, only held to this reality by the pain in his spine.

“Woah, woah. Shh. It’s okay, Keith, it’s okay. I’ve got you.”

The voice finally made it through the swirl of sensations, and Keith cracked his eyes open. Lance’s face swam before him, brows furrowed, eyes pained. He flashed a teary smile when he noticed Keith watching him, though, and that smile ignited something vast and dizzying inside of Keith.

“Lance?”

Laughing, Lance wrapped his arms around Keith’s neck, pulling him in for a hug that was one of the most awkward hugs Keith had ever experienced, between the helmets knocking against each other and the pains dotting his body and the fact that they were floating alone in the middle of empty space. Stunned, all Keith could do was lift his left hand to Lance’s back, cradling his broken right wrist against his stomach.

After a moment, Lance pulled back, sniffling and blinking as tears slipped down his face. He let go of Keith with one hand and knocked the hilt of Keith’s dagger against his faceplate. “I’m confiscating this, you asshole. Just so you know. You can have it back when you agree not to pull another stunt like that. _Say goodbye to Shiro and Akira for me—_ fuck you, Keith.”

“You’re the one who was going to get himself captured trying to shoot through a magic bubble,” Keith grumbled, though it was hard to keep up the irritation when relief was slithering through him, all syrupy-warm and aching. He wrapped his one good arm tighter around Lance and let himself drift.

Lance laughed once more, softly, the sound tickling Keith’s ear. Even separated by the comms and the helmets, Keith swore he could have felt Lance’s breath on his neck. “You’re _lucky_ I stayed. You know what would have happened if I hadn’t saved your ass?”

“Yeah,” Keith said, closing his eyes. He felt the wormhole close without seeing it—the light changed, the intangible feeling of nothingness compacted. He shivered, turning his face into the crook of Lance’s neck, and smiled as the Red Lion rumbled reproach inside his head. “I know. I--Thanks, Lance. Thanks for not giving up on me.”

* * *

Karen managed enough patience for a perfunctory farewell to the UN adviser she’d been talking to before she hung up and stood, her eyes locked on the front half of the bridge as she awaited the verdict. (An apt comparison, really. There was a curious sort of anticipation hanging in the air, the likes of which she’d only ever felt in the courtroom.) The wormhole had already closed behind the enemy vessel, the castle’s allies were sweeping the area for signs of stragglers, and the Yellow and Green Lions had peeled off toward the Earth to pick up Hunk and Pidge. Coran checked his screens once more, ran his fingers through frazzled hair, then sagged toward the Altean boy—Wyn—now curled against his chest.

“All clear, paladins.” His voice was scratchy, as though he’d been shouting for the duration of the battle. Perhaps he had; Karen was strung so taut with adrenaline she wasn’t sure she could have told the difference. “Go ahead and come back in. I think we all could use some rest after that.”

Weary but emphatic agreements echoed through the speakers, but Karen was already rushing for the elevator. “Ground floor,” she said. “Right?”

“Yeah.” Coran breathed in, then hesitated. “I’ll—Tell Allura I’ll be down in a tick.”

Karen flicked her wrist in acknowledgment, too far gone to even ask what, exactly, a tick was. Eli joined her in the elevator, looping an arm around her shoulder as it whisked them away. She leaned on him, covering her eyes with one hand and drawing in a slow, shuddering breath.

“They’re okay,” she whispered, hating how uncertain she sounded. “That’s what matters—they’re all okay.”

Eli gave her a quick squeeze, and then they were there—the massive hangar where the Black Lion had set down when they’d first arrived on the Castle of Lions. Could that have been scarcely more than an hour ago? It felt like years.

The hangar was more crowded now, the Red and Blue Lions joining the Black, as well as several other ships—four small and sleek, one even larger than the lions and klunky-looking. And still the hangar could have fit more. It was like standing inside a cathedral the size of several city blocks, the ceiling easily three or four stories high. Karen felt impossibly small standing at the elevator door, even smaller than she’d felt when she was whisked off to wait as her children dove into battle.

Akira was the first out of his ship, scrambling out of the cockpit of one of the small fighters and sprinting toward the lions. He met Shiro at the base of the Black Lion’s ramp, spinning them both around with an embrace that seemed as frantic as Karen’s thoughts. She knew, logically, that she had nothing more to worry about; Matt had been in Red, who had taken very few serious hits, and Pidge had radioed in from the ground saying things were all quiet on their end. But logic had never stopped a mother’s fear.

Shiro leaned into Akira for a moment, weary and sagging, and Akira grabbed his face in both hands, scrutinizing him like he expected to find a gaping wound.

“I’m fine,” Shiro murmured. “Just tired.”

Akira looked like he might have argued, but just then the Red Lion lowered her head. Meri, who had already emerged from the Blue Lion, went to stand by Allura as Shiro and Akira raced over to meet Keith, who hobbled down the ramp, supported by Lance on one side and Matt on the other. Lance stepped aside to let the brothers in, smiling as Shiro launched into a series of rapid-fire questions. Akira talked over him, flipping between exuberance and scolding so many times Keith seemed to give up trying to force an appropriate reaction and just stared at him, blinking.

“Seriously, kid, that was cool as _hell_ , but if you ever do that again I’ll ground you for a year.”

Keith frowned, then looked to Shiro, who laughed and rested a hand on Keith’s shoulder.

“What he means is, _I’m trying to be supportive, but you really scared us._ ” Shiro paused, his eyes darting to Akira. “And good luck getting him to reel it in. That’s one mystery I haven’t cracked yet.”

Matt gave a dramatic gasp and pulled Keith against his chest, startling a yelp out of him. “You take that back, Takashi,” Matt said, feigning indignation. “Keith does not need to be _cracked._ ”

Val emerged from the larger ship at that moment, followed closely by an alien Karen had not yet met, and Lance turned toward her. Shiro stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

“Lance.”

Lance turned. “Yeah?”

Shiro’s face softened, and he pulled Lance into a quick hug. “Thank you.”

With a nervous laugh, Lance wriggled out of Shiro’s arms, his face bright right. “Y-yeah,” he said. “No problem. Uh--” He flicked his index finger toward Val and, shaking his head, Shiro gestured for him to go. He scampered away and threw himself at Val with such gusto they both nearly lost their footing. Val’s laugh was watery, and Karen had to look away, feeling somehow voyeuristic for watching the celebrations.

Her eyes strayed back to Matt, who hadn’t yet given up his spot at Keith’s shoulder. There was a current between them, a connection so plain to see Karen felt foolish for not having considered before now that her children might have built a home while they were away. It was the way Matt’s gaze never left the back of Keith’s head, his face pinched in an expression Karen recognized all too well—affection, relief. A fierce desire to protect.

Smiling to herself, Karen went to join the group by the Red Lion.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

It took a moment for Keith to realize she was talking to him. “I--” he looked down at his wrist, which sat at an unnatural angle, and winced. “Yeah. I should probably have Coran set that.”

Frowning, Karen nudged his shoulder to turn him around, exposing an ugly wound on his back, which glowed with a strange violet light. “Actually, I was talking about this.”

“That…? Oh.” Keith craned his neck, exposing a series of deep punctures beneath his jaw, each of which oozed dark, sticky blood.

Karen’s heart clenched, and she barely suppressed the urge to stalk off in search of someone to blame. Instead, she _tsked_ , then placed a hand on Keith’s back (well away from the wound) and turned him toward the door. “That’s it. We’re getting you checked out. Is there a hospital somewhere on this space ship, or am I going to have to run home for a first aid kit?”

“Oh, no,” Matt said, keeping pace. “There’s a med bay. And thank god, too,” he added in a mutter. He avoided Karen’s questioning glance and shoved his hands in his pockets as his eyes found Keith’s. “Don’t give me that look. This is out of my hands now.”

“What do you mean, out of your hands?” Keith’s voice cracked ever so slightly on the last word, and Karen adjusted her mental estimate of his age. Not Matt’s age; younger. Closer to Lance and Hunk, perhaps? She’d have to ask someone. “What’s happening?”

Matt grinned, catching Karen’s eye. “I think Mom’s decided to adopt you. Sorry, should’ve warned you. She did the same thing to all of Dad's crews. How do you feel about changing your name? Keith Holt has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”

Keith’s footsteps slowed, his eyes going wide as he glanced from Matt to Karen, who only smiled. “Holt?” he whispered. “You--?”

“Hey!” Akira cried, stomping up beside Karen. Shiro trailed after him, looking amused. “No stealing! We saw him first. Back me up here, Takashi.”

Shiro only laughed, and Karen lifted her chin as she steered Keith toward the door. “Remind me, Akira,” she said. “Which one of us is familiar with the legal process of adoption?”

Before Akira could answer, a roar rattled the rafters, and Karen whirled, heart leaping into her throat as the last two lions appeared at the far end of the hangar. The Green Lion set down quietly not far from the Red, but the Yellow Lion loped along the ground for several massive steps, headed toward the Blue Lion where Allura stood with Meri. As Meri turned toward the Yellow Lion, it locked its legs and turned sideways, claws screeching against the metal floor as it slid to a stop inches from Meri. Its head swung around, chin coming to rest atop Meri’s head.

“Uh...” Hunk’s voice drifted out of the lion, tinged with confusion. “Sorry. I don’t—Yellow did that herself.”

Allura laughed as Meri, stunned, reached up and patted the lion’s chin. “It’s all right, Hunk,” Allura said. “I think Yellow just missed her. As we all did.”

Another rumble filled the air, seeming to emanate from all the lions at once, and Karen caught Eli’s gaze. He seemed as startled as she was. Sentient robots, indeed.

Near the Alteans, Pidge crashed into Lance, squeezing him so tight he wheezed. They buried their face in his chest, muttering a string of curses that made Karen’s eye twitch—though, in all fairness, she herself had taught them more than a few of those words.

“Don’t do that to us, you jerk,” they said when the profanities finally ran dry. “I thought we were gonna lose you— _both_ of you.” They raised their voice as they said this, glaring around Lance’s back at Keith, who offered a weak smile and a shrug.

A moment later, Hunk finally managed to get free from the Yellow Lion, which continued to dote on Meri (much to the annoyance of the Blue Lion, who pounced on her—and Karen realized quite suddenly she’d stopped thinking of them as machines and started thinking of them as animals, which was just the icing on top of this very strange cake.)

“It’s hard to wrap your head around, isn’t it?”

The voice startled Karen out of her contemplation of the lions, and she found an alien in armor like Pidge’s walking toward her. The woman had waxy skin, fleshy antennae, and eyes far too large for comfort, but she had a kind smile, and her deeply lined face softened when she glanced to where Lance and Hunk had begun wrestling, Pidge scaling them both like a free climber tackling a rock face.

“Watching my fourteen-year-old child fight a war without me?” Karen asked, dropping her voice low as Shiro steered Keith away from her. Matt gave her a lingering look, then retreated with Shiro and Keith. Karen sighed. “It’s going to take some adjustment, that’s for sure.”

The alien smiled. “If it helps, they have a lot of people looking out for them.”

“I’ve seen what they’re up against. I don’t think anything short of an army would put me at ease.” Karen paused, watching her son’s retreating back. “Not even that, I think.”

The woman smiled a commiserating smile. “I haven’t known Pidge long, but if there’s one thing I can say, it’s that they aren’t the sort to give up a fight.”

Karen thought of a younger Pidge, tears in their eyes, their hair hacked off with a pair of scissors. _There’s something they’re not telling us,_ they’d said, barely five feet tall but brimming with all the fire of a supernova and _daring_ Karen to tell them to back off. _I’m going to find out the truth._

She watched them now, a warrior. A savior of worlds. Her child, yes, but maybe not a child any longer.

“No,” Karen said, her heart heavy with the realization. “No, I don’t suppose they are.”

* * *

The paladins met Coran in the med bay a few minutes later, because after all Keith and Lance _did_ need medical attention, however much both of them tried to deny it. Matt thought Keith’s reluctance was ninety percent pride, while Lance’s was one hundred percent not wanting to make Keith feel bad for skewering Lance’s hand with a dagger. Which was kind of sweet, really, except for the part where Lance was dripping blood across the hangar floor and kept forgetting not to touch things with his injured hand.

Pidge and Lance kept up a steady stream of chatter as they walked, with occasional inputs from Akira, who grew more and more excited about the Altean craft he’d flown the further he got from the terrifying reality of battle. He’d split off from the others, briefly, to thank the three surviving members of his crew—Layeni and the two Galra, Ivka and Henrok—and told Layeni to pass the news along to the human refugees that the battle was over and Akira would see to getting them all home as quickly as possible. Matt kind of wanted to interrupt to remind them all that chasing Zarkon out of the area didn’t do a damn thing about the crystals growing inside them all, but he would have felt like a jerk for puncturing the celebratory air with a sobering reminder like that.

By the time they stepped out of the elevator on the eighteenth floor, the headache that adrenaline had been keeping at bay was out in full force, and Matt had to squint against the lights of the med bay as everyone piled in. Particularly offensive were the localized healing units Coran clamped onto Lance’s hand, Keith’s broken wrist, and the glowing purple claw marks on Keith’s back. Little neon strips along the backs of the devices shone at just the right angle to catch Matt’s eye and stab into his brain.

He slitted his eyes, massaging his head as Coran worked.

“You really ought to spend a tick in a pod,” Coran murmured, spreading some ointment and a liquid-bandage-like sealant on the punctures along Keith’s neck. Coran had had him strip to the waist, revealing a mass of singed fur and bruises visible as faint shadows underneath his fur. “I don’t like the look of that gash in your back.”

Keith grimaced. “I’m _fine._ ”

“You almost got kidnapped by space witches,” Lance said, poking Keith in the chest with the hand that wasn’t currently pinned inside a lightbox the size of a toaster. “Take a chill pill, man.”

“I’m not saying I’m _great_ ,” Keith huffed. “I’m just saying, I’ve had worse.”

Shiro, who was seated on Keith’s other side and spreading ointment on a burn, arched an eyebrow. “Yeah, when I drained all your Quintessence.”

Meri squawked an incredulous, _What?_ even as Lance sat upright, knocking skulls with Val, who had been peering at his healing hand. Lance rubbed his head, squinting at Keith. “Hey, yeah, that’s right! You got zapped like, a billion times while we were fighting the other druids. You’ve _got_ to be feeling that.”

“Yeah, and I’m being _smothered_ by humans right now." Keith glared pointedly at Shiro, who  _was_ sitting closer than strictly necessary, and then at Akira, who hovered just behind. "You guys have your own little Quintessence bubble or whatever. I’m _fine_.”

Matt chuckled, then winced as his head pounded anew, his good mood souring. A hand trailed along his arm, and he opened his eyes to find his mother staring back at him in concern. “Headache,” he said. He wouldn’t lie to her and say he was okay, but he really didn’t want to get into his body’s slow rebellion just now. His knee was doing… okay. The crystals embedded in his body weren’t bothering him beyond his usual aches. His foot did seem to have fallen asleep, which might have been the nerve damage or simply the product of sitting wrong during the battle without realizing it.

He supposed he couldn’t fault Keith for trying to downplay his injuries when Matt himself was doing much the same.

Fortunately, Coran finished his ministrations at that moment, and as he went to put away the ointment and wound glue and wash his hands, Hunk looked up from his quiet conversation with his uncle on the bed across from Lance. “Hey, Coran?”

Coran leaned his head back as he reached for a disposable towel. “Yes?”

“That thing we saw… in the caverns.” Hunk paused, glancing toward Pidge, who had been fussing over Beezer, asking him how his new battery and CPU were holding up, then glancing to Nyma for translation. They paused at Hunk’s question, though, and Matt saw a flicker of doubt cross their face. “You seemed to know what it was.”

Allura and Meri traded glances as Coran’s shoulders tensed. “I take it you didn’t have a chance to destroy it,” he said solemnly.

Pidge shook their head. “As soon as Vanda realized we were there, she shoved it at one of her soldiers and told them to run. And the way that thing masks people on the scanners...”

“There was no way you could have tracked it down,” Coran said. His shoulders slumped, and Matt felt his hackles rise as Coran turned around. He surveyed the room for a moment, then went to check on Keith and Lance, switching off the device healing Lance’s hand but leaving the two attached to Keith. “I don’t suppose you captured an image of it.”

Pidge frowned, calling up their keyboard and searching through their armor’s memory. A moment later, an image appeared in the air above their gauntlet. It was dark, but Matt easily picked out Vanda’s form. A Galra soldier was holding something out to her, like a shiny pink basketball.

Coran was silent. Allura reached out, seemingly unawares, and squeezed Meri’s hand. All three of them looked sick to their stomach, and Matt didn’t think he was the only one getting nervous.

“You know,” Hunk said, his voice shaking.

“I can’t be sure.” Coran conspicuously avoided Hunk’s gaze.

Pidge stood up, stepping away from Beezer. “But you have a guess?”

“One I desperately hope is wrong.” Coran looked up, trading meaningful looks with Allura and Meri. “Because that looks like a Vkullor egg.”

Before Matt could ask what the hell that was, Keith’s head snapped up, his eyes wide with fear. “A—? _No._ There’s no way. Those things died out millenia ago!”

“Just about ten thousand years,” Meri said with a small laugh.

Coran sighed. “But their eggs have been known to go dormant for massive periods of time. I don’t think anyone has ever confirmed one to be viable after more than four or five thousand years, but… it’s impossible to track the eggs. Our scientists theorized that some Vkullor eggs were much older than the ones we’d managed to date. _Much_ older.”

Keith swore softly.

“Sorry,” Shiro said, holding up a hand. “What’s a Vkullor?”

“A monster,” Allura said, softly, her voice so thick with emotion it silenced the room. She looked up, her eyes hard, then crossed to a computer terminal near the wall. “Vkullor are massive beasts, terrifying creatures that enter into the mythologies of many worlds. They have different names, take on different forms as the stories spread and distort, but they always retain one common thread.” She clicked on final button, and a hologram appeared in the center of the room. It showed an image Matt had glimpsed several times in Keith’s memories, a shattered planet. Nearly an entire hemisphere was gone, strewn about the planet as dozens of moons and natural satellites.

Shiro breathed out sharply. “That’s the Galra homeworld.”

Allura nodded. “And that’s what happens when a Vkullor attacks.”

“Shit,” Matt hissed.

Lance looked around, obviously trying to mask his unease. “But, I mean, what they found is just an egg. It’ll take time for it to grow, right?”

"Yes,” Coran said. “Typically a century from hatching to first hunt, several times that before it’s equipped to do what it did to Galra.”

“But that doesn’t really matter, does it?” Matt asked. Every pair of eyes turned toward him, and he quailed, gut churning. “Haggar has its DNA now, and we already know she’s been working on engineered creatures. Hell, if she even just isolates the genes that make it invisible to our scanners, if she can build that into her robeasts--?”

Nyma's breath hissed between her teeth. “We’re fucked.”

“No,” Shiro said, straightening. His voice had taken on the confident, unrelenting quality it had in battle, the tone that made it impossible not to trust that he knew what he was talking about. He looked around the room, meeting every gaze in turn. “This puts us at a disadvantage, yes, but we’ve overcome every challenge they’ve thrown at us so far. It will take time for Haggar to do anything with that egg. Time we can use to prepare.” He paused, his eyes falling on the image of the shattered planet. “We _will_ stop this.”

* * *

Wyn dozed in the lounge where the paladins’ families had spent the battle. His whole body hurt from using his power, the way it did after... After... He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember a lot of things, actually, including most of the battle. He was tired, he was sore—but Coran had left him with a soft blanket and a cup of something warm that tasted a little bit like the tea his parents used to make him when he was sick.

And he had Maka there, along with a human boy who called himself Mateo, and they were doing a pretty good job distracting Wyn from the things he couldn't quite remember. They were doing a better job than Rowan would have, actually, which was saying something.

“You’ll have to play Wyn later,” Maka was saying, fanning himself with his cards as Mateo frowned at the playing field in front of him. “He’s almost as bad as you.”

“Hey!” Mateo protested. “It’s not my fault I’m not an alien! Besides, I’m gonna beat you one of these times.”

Maka grinned, leaning back on one hand. “You wanna bet?”

Mateo sat up straighter, his face going all serious the way Lance’s did when he got stubborn about something, and Wyn had to smile. It faltered as the hushed, tense voices of the adults reminded Wyn of what had just happened. (Darkness, cold. Something pulling inside him.) Wyn squelched the flame that burned in the dark of his mind, filling him up with thoughts like suffocating smoke, and focused instead on the bright bubble of laughter as Mateo made a bad play and Maka tore through his defenses. Mateo gaped in horror, then slammed his cards down and demanded a rematch.

“You sure you wanna lose again?” Maka asked.

Mateo stuck his tongue out. “I’m _learning._ ”

There was darkness still inside Wyn, an aching emptiness that wanted to be filled with pain and loneliness and fear—but Wyn had learned how to fill that emptiness with other peoples’ light--and Mateo and Maka had a lot of light to offer. Wyn closed his eyes, letting himself drift off as Mateo and Maka bickered over their card game.

Time passed, and Wyn teetered on the edge of sleep, only to be startled awake by twin cries of, “Lance!”

Wyn yawned, rubbing sleep from his eyes as he peered across the room to the blur of colors where the paladins’ families welcomed them back. Shay was blushing in the Balmeran way, her Quintessence pooling just below her skin, as Hunk introduced her to his mothers. The two women seemed stunned for a moment, and then the shorter one—Akani, Wyn thought—folded Shay into a hug.

A few feet away, Val was bouncing on her toes, her hand clutching Nyma’s—either to ground herself or to keep Nyma from bolting, which it seemed she very much wanted to do.

“This is Nyma,” Val was saying to her family. “She’s… kinda my girlfriend.”

Somebody shrieked, and Wyn turned to see Luz up on her tiptoes, gripping Keith’s shoulder to balance as she reached for his ears. Mateo had Keith’s hand trapped between his own, claws held up to the light as Mateo jabbered at Maka about how sharp they were, and how long, and would Maka’s ever get to be like that? Matt hovered nearby, looking worried, and Lance had one hand clapped over his mouth, barely hiding his wide grin.

Someone sat down on the sofa near Wyn, and he glanced toward them, freezing when he recognized Shiro.

“How are you feeling?” Shiro asked. “Coran said that battle took a lot out of you.”

Squirming, Wyn ducked his head. “I guess.”

Shiro chuckled, reaching down to squeeze Wyn’s shoulder. “Well, I’m glad you’re okay. I was worried, you know.”

“About me?” Wyn looked up shyly, and Shiro nodded. He _looked_ worried, too, which struck Wyn as odd. He was just a nobody, the son of forgotten smugglers who should have lived and died a weapon of the Galra Empire. Surely Shiro had more important things to worry about.

(Quiznak, if only Rowan were here to see this.)

But Shiro was staring back at him with kind eyes and a kind smile, as if in the middle of a room full of his own people—his own family—nobody mattered as much as Wyn. “I could feel you, you know. I don’t know exactly what was happening, but I felt you holding Zarkon back. And I have to say, I’m impressed. Not just anyone can go up against Zarkon like that. You should be proud.”

“I didn’t do all that much.”

“You saved me,” Shiro said, and waited for Wyn to meet his eyes before he continued. “Zarkon was coming after me. He wanted to destroy me—me and Allura and the Black Lion—and I think he might have succeeded if you hadn’t distracted him. So… thank you.”

A slow smile pulled at Wyn’s face, the blank patches in his memory becoming just a little less daunting. He’d found a good place here, and he didn’t think he’d ever stop being grateful for the people like Shiro and Lance and Coran who had worked so hard to make him feel welcome. And maybe, someday, he’d find a way to repay them for all they’d done.

* * *

There was always a lot of work to do in the aftermath of a battle, and the scale of this one only multiplied the work. Allura sent the paladins off to their families, off to rest and relax in their own ways, while she and Coran debriefed with Anamuri and the human forces. There would, of course, be a lot more to do where Earth was concerned, but the wheels of government turned slowly on any world. Allura suspected it would be some hours yet before anyone was ready to meet with her.

Eventually, there was nothing more to be done. The system had been searched for Galra forces lying in wait, search parties had been sent out to comb the wreckage for survivors--and for bodies to be given proper respect. Allura sent Coran off to his own well-earned rest, then went in search of Meri.

Allura found her sitting in the frosty darkness of the castle’s computer core, staring at the row of memory cylinders where Lealle’s profile was stored. Even having expected it,  the sight still gave Allura pause, an old ache starting up again in her chest. This was where she and Meri had had their last conversation, just before the battle that had ended with Allura in stasis for ten thousand years. They’d sat here, alone, in the dark. Five minutes talking to Lealle, and another forty holding each other as the pain reached a new peak.

Stepping softly, Allura joined Meri on the narrow bench facing the memory cylinders. She hesitated, then leaned her head on Meri’s shoulder, giving herself a moment to appreciate the fact that Meri was _here_. That Allura had recovered this one piece of the life that had been ripped away from her.

After a moment, Meri’s arm curled around Allura’s waist, pulling her closer.

“You miss her,” Allura said. It wasn’t a question.

Meri chuckled, a watery sound. “I hadn’t realized how much. I mean—I’ve had time. I’ve mourned them. I came to terms with it. Or...” She paused, her thumb rubbing back and forth along Allura’s ribs. “I thought I had. I guess it was easier when I knew I didn’t have the option of talking to her.”

Allura could sympathize with that. She turned her head, never lifting it from Meri’s shoulder, and studied her face. “Do you want to talk to her now?”

“I… no.” Meri shook her head. “Soon, but not today. Today’s a good day. I don’t want to ruin it with ugly crying.”

"You know she'd have you laughing before you knew it."

Meri grinned, blinking rapidly. "She'd have me tongue-tied and blushing, too."

Allura's cheeks warmed as she thought of her scattered, pained conversations with her mother's AI. Meri had featured more often than most others in those conversations, and Allura suspected Lealle had only held off on teasing her because of Allura's grief. Now that Meri was alive again, all bets were off.

Smiling, Allura stood and pressed a kiss to Meri’s cheek. She kept her face placid as Meri whipped her head around to gape at her, never mind the storm raging inside her. Meri looked very much as she had when they were younger, her eyes bright like polished brass, the light of the computer core glimmering in her hair like rubies. She was beautiful, and Allura could have stared at her for days without tiring of it.

She grabbed Meri's hand, heart swelling as she remembered how well they fit—every piece of them. Their fingers intertwined as they helped each other through some of the old paladins’ more brutal obstacle courses, their shoulders pressed together as they hid from Alfor after a prank. Meri was a piece of herself Allura had been missing for far too long—and Allura was a piece Meri had been missing for far longer. Now that they were together, Allura never wanted to let go. She tugged on Meri’s hand, pulling her to her feet.

Meri glanced one last time at Lealle’s cylinder, then followed Allura back to the ladder and up onto the bridge. They found a spot at the edge of the room, looking out through the viewscreen at the stars, at the moon, at the Earth. Meri sat with her back against the slim metal pillar that framed the window, and Allura sat between Meri’s legs, leaning against her chest. She could feel Meri’s heart pounding against her back, a rhythm almost perfectly matched to her own, and smiled.

“I still can't believe it,” Allura said, breathless. She kept expecting Meri to pull away, or to fade to vapor. She kept expecting to wake up and find it was still just her and Coran, the last of their species, fighting a losing battle against an unbeatable foe. “That you're here. That _we're_ here.”

Meri was still for a long moment before she relaxed, wrapping her arms around Allura. Allura reached up, her own hands latching on to Meri’s wrists. She wanted to preserve this feeling—warmth, safety. Belonging. There would be plenty of work to do tomorrow, and for many tomorrows to come, but for once Allura was in no rush to get there.

"I missed you, Meri."

Meri pressed her lips to the crown of Allura's head, her warm breath raising the hairs along Allura's neck. "I missed you, too."

* * *

Days passed, and the Castle of Lions remained busy. There were talks to be had with the UN and other “concerned parties”—starting with a debate over whether the UN had the authority to negotiate with an alien power, or whether that should be left to every individual country. On top of that, there were repairs to organize in Carlsbad and Mumbai, along with a handful of other cities that had seen debris falling from the battle raging in space. Shiro, Allura, Coran, and Karen took the lead on these efforts, along with Anamuri and several of her highest ranking officers. Pidge rarely saw any of them, except sometimes at breakfast—dinner for the diplomatic party, who had to adjust their sleep schedule for New York, while Pidge adjusted for daytime in Mumbai to help out with relief efforts there.

And in case all that wasn’t enough, Shay had a dozen new patients to look after, checking each of the former prisoners of Project Balmera for crystal implants, educating them about their condition, and collecting contact information so that she could find them if her plan to bring a team of Balmeran healers to Earth panned out.

Two days after the Castle of Lions reached Earth, she discharged most of her human passengers—all except Layeni, who claimed not to have anything waiting for her on Earth. She disappeared one day for a long talk with Coran, and emerged with her head held high and a quiet word from Coran that she would be staying on “to help,” whatever that meant. The former prisoners who had homes to return to did their best to cope with the media scrutiny that greeted their return. Val, at least, seemed to be loving the spotlight, holding several interviews to talk about the Galra, the paladins, and the war, and meeting with the families of the prisoners who had died, including a man named Luis who had apparently been a friend of hers.

She’d been quiet after she returned from those conversations, hugging a pillow to her chest and leaning against Nyma for several long hours. Pidge had left them to their hushed conversation, though they had sent Lance along when they spotted him in the hallway.

The paladins’ families remained on the castle-ship through those first days. Karen was too worn out from the diplomacy to think about cleaning up the mess the Garrison had left at their house, Akira was caught up in some secret project of his own, and the rest seemed wary of returning to the surface. Given the fact that no one was sure whether or not all of Iverson’s supporters had been cleared out, Pidge figured it was a sensible precaution.

They’d have to figure out a way to protect them all when it came time for the paladins to move on.

But Pidge wasn’t thinking about that right now. It was getting late, by Mumbai standards, and Pidge was curled up in the rec room with Matt, watching TV with the Carlsbad team—the four blue paladins, plus Keith--because, as Lance put it, “Half this castle is disturbingly behind on Earth culture.” Pidge was pretty sure he was going to forcibly introduce everyone to the growing collection of movies, TV shows, music, video games, and ebooks they’d transferred to the castle’s memory banks—it was just that Keith and Nyma were so far the only ones not buried to their necks in more important tasks. (Well, those two and Ryner, who had somehow managed to appease Lance by agreeing to listen to an audiobook version of _Harry Potter_ while she gardened.) They all agreed _X-files_ had to be one of the first shows they marathoned, but only when everyone could be there. Pidge had to admit they were looking forward to it.

Beside them, Matt raised a hand to massage the bridge of his nose. It was the third time he’d done that since they’d started watching TV—a random assortment of sitcoms, none of which were holding anyone’s attention—and Pidge frowned.

“You okay?”

Matt smiled, though it seemed strained. “Just a headache. All that blue light, I guess,” he nodded toward the holoscreen where the show was playing.

Pidge’s frown deepened. It was true that the castle’s displays all had a bluish tint to them when viewed from an angle, which theoretically should have lent itself to eyestrain, but Pidge had spent plenty of time staring at computers over the course of their fourteen years, and the castle’s screens were some of the best for keeping their eyes happy—better than most of the red filters they’d tried on their laptop. And they’d tried a lot of filters, considering they did most of their programming late at night.

“I’d say it sounds like sensory overload except that you’ve never had a problem with that before,” they mused. “But I dunno. Wanna use one of my stim toys? Mom brought up a bunch of them when she stopped by the house yesterday. Or--hell--we've got Tylenol again. No more wondering whether Altean medicine's just gonna make you sicker.”

Matt smiled, but shook his head. “It’s fine, Pidge.”

Pidge shrugged and settled back against him, smiling when he draped his arm across their back. Their gaze drifted away from the TV, and they caught Meri staring at Matt, her brow furrowed. Noticing Pidge, she shook herself and turned back to the show, but when, twenty minutes later, Pidge and Matt decided to call it a night, Meri stood and followed them to the door.

“Hey, Matt,” she said. “You said you’ve been getting headaches?”

There was something in her tone that set Pidge’s teeth on edge. Matt eyed her nervously as he nodded. “It’s no big deal, really--”

“How long?”

Matt blinked. “Uh… what?”

“How long have you been getting these headaches?”

“I don’t know… a week or so?” Matt held up a hand before Meri could go on. “Before you ask, yeah. I hit my head fighting those cyborg things at the Garrison, and, yeah, I had Coran run a scan. It’s not that.”

Meri nodded. “That’s when they started, then?”

“…Yeah.”

Pidge met Meri’s eyes, glad to see they weren’t the only one who’d spotted that massively obvious lie. They turned their gaze to Matt. “When _did_ they start?”

Matt avoided their eye for a long moment, then huffed. “Okay, fine. I had a headache or two— _little ones—_ a couple days before that. It was just stress. Totally unrelated to--”

“So it started after the first fight with Shiro,” Meri said. “Allura told me—that massive influx of Quintessence? The crystals growing out of control?”

Pidge’s stomach dropped. “You think that’s what’s causing the headaches?”

Meri hesitated. “I don’t know. Maybe?” She worried her lip for a long moment, then laid a hand on Matt’s arm. “Look, I have a theory about this, but I could be way off-base. Would you mind trying a few things? It won’t take long.”

“Yeah,” Matt said. “Yeah, okay.” He glanced at Pidge, smiling weakly. “You don’t need to wait up for me, Pidge. I’ll see you in the morning.”

And before Pidge could press Meri for more answers, she and Matt were gone.

* * *

Shiro rubbed at the knot in his neck as he landed the shuttle back in its hangar. He agreed with Karen and Allura that bringing the Black Lion to the UN Headquarters skirted too close to the line of intimidation for what were, ostensibly, peace talks, but he couldn’t help missing Black’s soothing presence at the edge of his mind. He thought it might have helped him get through the long slog of bureaucracy that had been his life for the last few days.

The thing was, Shiro was not a politician. He’d accepted his place as the Black Paladin, and he knew that meant dealing with prospective allies for negotiations and peace talks. But so far, that had been confined to small villages or rebellions like the one headed by Anamuri. Those “talks” had lasted a few hours, because there were realistically only two parties involved—however much the other side fought with itself over how to proceed.

This, though.

Karen patted his shoulder as he slumped backward in his chair. “We’re getting there,” she said, and Shiro appreciated that she didn’t try to be overly optimistic about any of this. She had bags under her eyes her makeup couldn’t entirely mask, and she arched her back as she headed for the door, her shoes dangling from one hand.

Shiro smiled, then forced himself to stand and accompany Allura out of the shuttle. She was really the only one of them who knew what she was doing. Her and Coran, when he accompanied them, which he hadn’t since the first day. Too much else to do, he said, and the UN was already petrified by the presence of three aliens in its halls. Alteans were better than the representatives of the _Kera_ , who were overtly nonhuman and drew speechless stares everywhere they went, even several days after the news first broke.

In all honesty, Shiro would have gladly left the negotiations to the actual diplomats, but his presence was, if not exactly compulsory, then strongly desired on all fronts. Allura had asked Karen along for her legal expertise, ignoring Karen’s protests that international politics was outside her focus, and Karen had latched onto Shiro as a familiar face. And the UN delegates themselves… Well, it had started as a desire to speak to the survivors of the Kerberos mission. Matt had come along for a few hours the first day, and the two of them had told their story—told it as succinctly as they could, both being equally reluctant to get into the details of their capture. Fortunately, an overview had been sufficient to chill the delegates into taking Allura and Anamuri’s offers of aid seriously.

But after that first day, Shiro found himself invited back. Officially, he was listed as a leader of the foreign delegation, along with Allura and Anamuri. Unofficially, he suspected the people of Earth were simply more comfortable negotiating with one of their own.

So there he was.

Akira was waiting when Shiro exited the shuttle, and Shiro would have been glad for the promise of distraction from political nightmares if not for Akira’s expression. He had his lip caught between his teeth, and he seemed more than a little reluctant to meet Shiro’s eyes.

Shiro slowed, frowning. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing...” Akira said slowly.

“Don't lie, Akira. Something's bothering you.”

Sighing, Akira shook his head. “Takashi… It’s been three days,” he said, meeting Shiro’s gaze. “Don’t you think you should go see Mom and Dad?”

Shiro tensed, his hand going automatically to the socket of his prosthetic. Akira’s eyes followed the gesture, sorrow pinching his brow as he traced the metallic lines up the sleeves of the borrowed Altean uniform Shiro had worn to the UN—a suit, he’d found, felt too much like a costume, and he’d refused the Garrison’s offer to replace his old dress uniform. He'd briefly debated finding a pair of gloves to cover his prosthetic, then reminded himself that his story was written plainly enough on his face for anyone to read. If a metal arm was where they drew the line, then so be it. He wasn't going to hide.

Akira had heard the story of the Arena by now, of course; Shiro could hardly have kept it a secret forever. Late the first night, after everyone had begun to nod off (some in the common areas, some in rooms Allura and Coran cleaned up for their guests), Shiro had removed the prosthetic and told Akira everything. He’d taken it better than Shiro thought he would, though Shiro still caught an occasional flash of grief in his eyes.

Grief, though. Not disgust. Not fear. Not pity. Akira saw Shiro's pain. Shared Shiro's pain. It was as simple as that.

Shiro was grateful--deeply so. That didn’t mean he could forget all the visible signs of his experience, or the way the rest of his family would probably react.

“I’ve been busy,” Shiro said, dodging the question.

Allura, sensing his discomfort, placed a hand on his arm. “They’re your _family_ , Shiro,” she said gently. “I’m sure they would want to see you.” She paused. "I know _you_ want to see them."

Akira regarded her with curiosity. They hadn’t had much time to get to know each other, but they were among the most important people in Shiro’s life, and both obviously recognized this fact. Akira considered Allura for a moment longer, then turned back to Shiro. “They know you’re busy. You wouldn’t have to stay long.”

“I don’t know, Akira...”

“Would it help if I came along?” Allura asked.

Shiro looked from one of them to the other, both so cautious and yet plainly concerned for him. He knew they wanted him to be happy, but Shiro hadn’t been able to shake the fear that if he did this, he wouldn’t be able to continue as a paladin of Voltron. He knew it was foolish; reuniting with Akira had done nothing but strengthen his resolve and lift his spirits, but he was… scared.

He was scared.

Admitting that was strangely liberating

He closed his eyes, battling his own emotions—more turbulent recently because of the long, stressful days at the UN—and then, finally, nodded. “Okay. Okay. Let’s go.”

* * *

They took the Black Lion, because apparently Akira had told the family about her, and because Shiro’s fears dwindled to a distant speck with Allura and Black both inside his head to reassure him. Shiro’s grandparents had lived in Tokyo when he’d visited them as a child, but after his grandmother died, his grandfather had gone to live with Shiro’s aunt and uncle in a small town in Tokushima-ken. A few neighbors gathered to watch the Black Lion’s arrival, but they kept their distance, either out of fear or respect. Shiro had no doubt the rumors would soon start to fly.

He stalled again as the door opened and his parents emerged. Akira had obviously prepared them, because neither of them looked intimidated by the lion towering over the house. They just smiled, blinking back tears as they searched the lion for signs of her occupants.

“Ready?” Akira asked.

Shiro nodded, standing mechanically and following Akira down the ramp, Allura hovering just behind. This close to Black, he could sense Allura’s mind clearly, and her quiet joy bolstered him.

His father stepped forward as soon as Shiro appeared, speaking rapidly in Japanese. For a moment, Shiro’s mind froze, the language he’d spoken his whole life stagnating in his ears as Black’s translator failed to kick in. He felt her confusion, and Allura’s, and realized it had been a year and a half since he’d heard more than snatches of conversation that didn’t immediately parse into English. His throat tightened as he scrambled back through fragmented memories. He wondered if it was possible to have an entire facet of yourself ripped away by war.

The Black Lion purred softly, halting his internal panic, and Shiro forced himself to breathe. This wasn’t a loss. It was, if anything, complacency. Months on end without having to think about language. Without _letting_ himself think of his family. He'd gotten lazy.

The panic passed, and Shiro’s mind slid back into familiar tracks—dusty tracks, to be sure, but clear enough once he uncovered them.

“Akira told us,” his aunt was saying, while his mother dissolved into a whispered mantra of his name and his father turned to soothe her. “Akira told us he’d found you. We’ve seen you on the news.”

Shiro smiled, swallowing around a lump in his throat. “Sorry I didn’t come sooner.”

“You were busy,” his father said. “We understand.”

Tears pressed at Shiro's eyes, and he felt suddenly ashamed for his reluctance. “No,” he said, taking a shaky breath. “No, I should have come. I’ll _always_ come home. I promise.”

His mother smiled, and the pride in her eyes made him ache. “Enough with the apologies, Takashi. Will you stay for a while? For tea, at least?”

“Of course.” He turned toward Allura to ask if that was alright, and realized Akira had been translating for her. They both smiled at him, tears in their eyes, and Shiro gave a watery laugh before leading them inside.

* * *

“So… Keith.”

Keith glanced to the side, more surprised than he should have been that Val had finally decided to speak. She’d found him coming out of a seldom-used training deck ( _not_ equipped with the gladiator, unfortunately; Keith was beginning to suspect someone had turned off that functionality while he “recovered”--in case it wasn't bad enough that Matt and Meri had boxed him out of the usual training deck.) The first little while had been awkward, as Keith and Val did not, as a rule, spend much time together. Especially without Lance there to serve as a buffer.

Actually, this might have been the first time they'd ever really talked.

“Uh.” Keith’s ear twitched, and he resisted the urge to reach up and hold it still. “That’s me.”

A smile flickered across Val’s face, and she let her next step carry her to the side so her arm bumped against Keith’s. He rolled with the motion, still frowning. “Keith,” Val said. “ _Keeeeeith._ I haven't seen you around much. Almost have to wonder if you're avoiding me on purpose.”

He ducked his head, uncertainty gnawing at his chest. “Uh. Yeah. I kinda figured—with everything they did to you—that maybe you needed some space.”

“You… what?” Val’s steps slowed, and Keith hunched his shoulders. _Good going, Keith,_ he thought. _Now you've made her uncomfortable._ It always seemed to make people feel bad, like he’d avoided them to make them feel guilty for being prejudiced or something, when that wasn’t it at all. A few seconds ticked past in awkward silence, then Val hurried to catch up. “That’s sweet.”

Well _that_ certainly wasn’t the usual response. Keith glanced at Val, fully expecting her to give some sign that she was being ingenuous, but she was just smiling at him, her head tilted to the side. Keith wasn’t the best at reading people, and humans less than most, but she seemed to mean it. “Sweet? Really?”

She chuckled. “Sure. I’ll admit, I was pretty messed up at first. I mean, I didn’t exactly make an effort to hang out with you, did I?” She wrinkled her nose. “Not that that has anything to do with _you_ , of course.”

“No, but it’s-- You don’t have to _blame_ me for the sight of me to make you nervous.”

“Heh. You’re a smart cookie, you know that?” Val folded her arms across her chest, rubbing the sleeves of her white sweater. She’d brought several changes of clothes to the castle-ship, as had all of the paladins—not enough to indicate whether any of them meant to stay once the castle decided to move on, but enough for a week or so. It made Val look… softer. The thin sweater, the patterned dress she wore underneath. Keith supposed he just wasn’t used to there being another side to people that existed outside war. It was just one more thing he hadn’t realized he needed to learn. “I can see why Lance likes you so much.”

Keith frowned at her. “I’m pretty sure the reason he likes me is because I let him talk as much as he wants to.”

That drew a laugh out of Val, bright and cheerful. "That'd do it."

“Why are you talking to me?” Keith asked. He immediately cringed at the question, and tried again. “Why _now_ , I mean. What changed?”

“Nothing.” Val shrugged. “I just wanted to talk. Get to know the guy my baby cousin’s always talking about.”

Keith snorted.

“I mean it!” She pursed her lips, turning around to walk backwards in front of him. Lance did the same thing sometimes, and it usually ended with Keith having to grab him before he ran into a wall. The thought made him smile, and Val poked the corner of his mouth, making him jerk back. “A-ha! See? You see it, too. He _likes_ you.”

Keith grabbed her hand as she tried to poke him again, lowering his ears halfway in a silent warning that Val didn’t seem to recognize. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Mm, no, I'm pretty sure I do.” When Keith didn't immediately relent, Val huffed, stopping in front of Keith with her hands on her hips. “Come on. _Ooh, Keith, come spar with me. Keith. Yo, Keith, wanna get dinner? Keith, hey. Hey. Hey, Keith, pay attention to me, Keith._ He _literally_ cannot stop touching your hair.”

"Because Luz wanted to see my hair braided."

Val's eyebrows shot up. "He's _flirting_ , you numbskull. Open your eyes."

"Even if you're right," Keith said, tugging uncomfortably on the hem of his jacked. "Which I'm not saying you are... Lance flirts with a lot of people.”

“He doesn’t almost get captured by an evil alien empire for a lot of people, though. So…?”

Keith avoided her eyes, his ears beginning to quiver in embarrassment. He was glad Val hadn’t been around him for long, because it meant she didn’t immediately pounce on the tell. Because, yeah, Keith hadn’t missed the way Lance held onto him when they were out there floating in the middle of empty space. He hadn’t been able to _stop_ thinking about it, really. He tried to tell himself it was practicality, but part of him wondered whether you really needed _that much_ contact to stick close together in zero G. Surely not. Surely…

With a flip of her hand, Val turned around and kept walking, Keith trailing after her. “Look, all I’m saying is I want Lance to be happy, and he wants _you_ to be happy.”

“He does?”

“Heard it with my own ears. You’ve had a rough life, and he wants to help you find where you belong.” She smiled over her shoulder. “I’m not saying you have to, or anything. I just think, if you both want the same thing, why not go for it?”

Keith hunched his shoulders. “You’re assuming we both want the same thing.”

“At least talk to him about it.”

Keith looked up and found Val watching him, her eyebrows lifted. She seemed so earnest he couldn’t bring himself to say no. “ _Fine._ I’ll talk to him.”

“Cool! He’s in here.” She stopped outside the door to the observatory. Keith, not having been paying attention to where they were going, had to glance over his shoulder to make sure he actually was where it seemed he was. He hesitated, staring at the door, and Val elbowed him in the side. “It’s your call. But I do think it’s a good idea. For what it’s worth.”

With that, she turned and left, abandoning Keith outside a closed door. He shifted his feet, his hand trying twice to reach for the door controls even as his eyes darted back the way he’d come. Val was already out of sight, her footsteps fading into the distance. She’d never know if Keith walked away, and even if she did find out—so what? She’d _said_ it was his call. She could hardly get mad at him for making a decision she didn’t like.

Still he hesitated, thinking of Lance’s face just before Keith had thrown the knife. Thinking of Lance dangling below him at the top of a cliff on Arus as Shiro stalked toward them. Keith didn’t think he’d ever been as terrified as he’d been in that moment, frozen with the knowledge that Lance would die without him. He’d held onto Lance on the cliff, and he’d said goodbye to Lance on Zarkon’s ship—all because he’d been overcome by the desperate, agonizing desire to see Lance _safe_.

That much, he was pretty sure, was mutual.

Keith touched two fingers to the door controls, and the light from the hallway painted his shadow across the floor of the observatory. Lance turned toward the light, breaking into a smile that left Keith’s pulse faltering.

“Keith!”

Lance patted the floor beside him, and Keith crossed toward him. The door slid shut, leaving the two of them alone in the darkness. Lance lay on his back, one ankle propped up on the other knee, his face tilted back. Keith lay down beside him, both feet planted on the floor, his hands folded on his stomach. He followed Lance’s gaze and found the Earth staring back at him, a circle painted in blue and green, a crescent at the edge wreathed in darkness.

“You know, Shiro and Matt are always saying this is the most beautiful sight in the universe.” Lance’s voice was soft, awed, and Keith couldn’t help turning toward him. This was a side of Lance he’d rarely seen, his guard down, his expression peaceful. A small smile graced his lips—not his usual buoyant smile, just… content. His face was softly lit by the light reflected off the Earth, his eyes wide and intent, like he was memorizing all the little details of home. “I think they might be right.”

Keith turned his gaze back toward the dome overhead, trying to see what Lance saw. It was a planet just like any other. More blue than most, perhaps, but not all that different from anything else Keith had seen. Though he supposed it must be different knowing that this was home. Keith didn’t have that anywhere. He’d been born on a ship, he’d spent his childhood on a ship, and before he met Shiro, he figured he’d die on a ship.

There were worse places out there than Earth to call home.

“I thought I was going to lose you, you know,” Lance said. The quiet contentedness had drained out of his voice, and Keith felt his own mouth run dry. He didn’t turn to look at Lance this time, though he could feel Lance’s eyes locked onto the side of his head. “I thought you were going to die.”

“I thought so, too,” Keith admitted, still staring at the Earth.

Lance shifted, turning his whole body to face him, and still Keith couldn’t make himself move. He just lay there, the fur on the back of his neck standing on end. “Then why?” Lance asked.

Keith’s ear swiveled toward Lance.

“Why’d you do it?” Lance asked. “Why’d you sacrifice yourself for me?”

“I didn’t--” Keith faltered, closing his eyes. “That druid wasn’t going to let me go. No matter what I did, she was going to hold onto me, and you weren’t leaving.”

“I wouldn’t.” Lance sat up, leaning over into Keith’s line of sight so Keith no longer had the option of not looking. “There’s no way in hell I would ever leave you with them.”

Keith’s heart clenched in equal parts pain and gratitude. “I know,” he said softly. “That’s why I had to get you out.” He paused, turning his gaze away from Lance and the horrible hurt in his eyes. “It’s not like _you_ have any room to talk. Didn’t you do the same thing with Wyn when you found him?”

“I...”

Keith waited for Lance to mount a defense, but he remained silent, propped up on his elbows and staring at Keith as Keith stared at his toes. At length, Lance huffed and laid back down.

“That’s different.”

“ _How?_ ”

“Wyn’s just a kid. I _had_ to protect him.”

Keith rolled his eyes, glad Lance wasn’t looking at him; he had a feeling his smile would ruin the effect of his disapproval. “Well, fine. Maybe we both had good reasons for doing what we did. Doesn’t mean we have to make a habit of it.”

“You mean you’re _not_ going to throw yourself into danger anymore?” Lance asked, a laugh bubbling up behind his words.

Keith turned, scowling. “Not the kind that’ll get me killed, no.”

Smiling, Lance reached out to flick Keith’s ear. “Yeah, that’ll be the day.”

“Hey!” Keith pushed himself up to glare at Lance, who smiled easily back. “I can manage better than _you._ ”

Lance arched an eyebrow. “You wanna bet?”

Keith opened his mouth for an angry retort, and then the ridiculousness of the conversation hit him. He blinked, lay back down, and bit down on a smile. “First one to die loses.”

Lance laughed again, the sound soothing away Keith’s irritation. He settled back in, his face turned toward the stars, and gave a start when Lance’s hand found his.

“I’m gonna hold you to that one, samurai. No dying without me.”

Keith’s heart was hammering in his chest, but he managed the coordination needed to fit his fingers between Lance’s, their hands resting on the ground between them. “No dying,” he agreed. “It’s a promise.”

* * *

Thace waited until he’d left the Galra fleet behind before contacting the spymaster. More specifically, he waited until he’d left Galra airspace, opened three wormholes, and taken two of them. Then he found the old breeding grounds of a ykkar where he could be relatively sure he wouldn’t be found, started the shuttle’s emergency medical procedures, and put himself under while the worst of his injuries healed. His vision problems, unfortunately, were beyond the scope of the shuttle’s capabilities, so he woke to a world still hazy on one side. At least his hearing was better.

“Thace.” The fact that the spymaster answered his transmission in less than two seconds wasn’t damning in itself; she always answered promptly, even if the alert roused her from the first sleep she’d found in a week.

The accusation in her voice, though—that was enough to make Thace’s ears fold back.

“I take it Dez already filed her report.”

The spymaster arched an eyebrow at him. “You know, actually she _did_.” She paused, her voice souring. “ _Eight vrekking days ago._ ”

Thace cringed. Leave it to Dez to be punctual even in reporting something that technically qualified as disaster. “I can explain.”

“Eight days _,_ Thace! I thought you were dead! Do you know how many times I’ve tried to contact you? How many times _Kolivan_ has? And _I_ have to deal with him when he gets like that. All growly and short-tempered, like somebody set his braid on fire. All because _you_ decided to be dramatic.”

“You’re not being fair.”

Her eyes went wide in that way she had. The way that said, _Do you really want to have this argument?_ He wondered if she used that on everyone, or if he was special. “Fair?” she asked. “ _I’m_ not being fair? By the _ancients_ , Thace! Ever since we were kids, it’s the same story!”

“You drag me into trouble and then complain about how it’s my fault?”

She paused, scowling at him for a long moment. Then her lips twitched, some of the anger draining out of her. “Actually, I was going to say how you always whine and moan about my ideas, then get caught up in the excitement and charge on ahead with out me, landing yourself in bigger trouble than I _ever_ meant for us to fall into, but, sure. Yours works too.”

Thace covered his face in his hands. “ _Keena._ Can we please be serious for once?”

“Nope.” Keena tossed her hair over her shoulder. She wore it shaved on one side of her head, long on the other, in a way that made her look closer to twenty than well into her forties. Said it was all part of the act. No one was supposed to know who the Spymaster of the Accords was, not even her own agents.

Of course, Keena had thrown that tradition out the window by filling up her first missives to Thace and Dez with so many winks and nudges he’d been half tempted to throw himself out the airlock.

He never had figured out how his sister had managed to turn the biggest failure of her career into a promotion of the highest order. He supposed that was all part of her ‘charm.’

“Keena,” Thace said, struggling for calm. “ _Please_. You know what Haggar was doing. I couldn’t let her unleash those things on the universe.”

For just a moment, the levity was gone from Keena’s face. He remembered her in her prime—a field agent of unparalleled skill, with a cold edge hiding just beneath the surface that, on occasion, left Thace feeling as though he didn't know the woman he'd grown up with. She could go anywhere, learn anything, clean up any loose end, all without batting an eye. The Accords had lost something great when she’d been forced into an early retirement by her own conscience.

Thace supposed her son took after her in that regard.

"I know, Thace,” she said. “I’ve already got Ulaz following up on it. For now...” Like flipping a switch, her cheer was back. She tapped a key on her end, and a few seconds later an encrypted message appeared on Thace’s comm screen. “I’ve got a new mission for you!”

“A new— _Keena_.”

“Thace.”

“I just got _blown up._ Isn’t this the part where I come back to New Altea and—and get a desk job somewhere? Come complain to you about how dull and meaningless my life has become?”

Keena snorted. “Okay, first of all, you can complain to Luc, not me, _thank you very much_. Second of all, relax. It’s just a little detour. You’ll be _fine_.”

Thace didn’t like the sound of that. Nor did he like the smile Keena was giving him, all false innocence and an air of anticipation. Gritting his teeth, he opened her message, bringing up his new destination on the nav computer.

“ _Earth?_ Keena, you can’t _honestly_ \--”

“Thace,” Keena said before he could finish. Her voice had gone flat the way it did when he’d run up against the end of her tolerance and, as always, it caught him off guard. “Am I or am I not your commanding officer?”

Thace grit his teeth. “You are.”

“Good.” Keena’s smile was back, but more brittle this time. “The council’s been talking. They think it’s time for us to forge an alliance with the paladins. All we need is someone to show them the way. I volunteered you! This way, you get to have a trans-universal longhaul with your nephew! Won’t that be fun?”

There was a vein pounding in his forehead, and he struggled for calm. “Keena. I love the boy, you _know_ I do, but he wouldn’t know tact if it crawled inside his ear and _died_.”

“And it’s all thanks to your _wise_ and _nurturing_ tutelage during his formative years.”

“Oh, don’t even start, Keena,” Thace growled. “If you cared about his 'formative years' so much, you would have fled to New Altea the second you realized you were pregnant.”

“You know why I couldn’t do that.”

“And _you_ know I couldn’t have taken him in—not without disobeying _your_ orders to maintain my cover. I was your commander, Keena, and Keith’s father was still alive. _What was I supposed to do?_ ”

Keena sighed, her gaze trailing to something beyond the edge of her screen. “I don’t know, Thace. I don’t. Just… tell him I’m sorry, okay? Tell him I never wanted to leave him.”

With a snort, Thace uploaded the coordinates Keena had sent him to his nav computer and prepared the wormhole for his jump. “Tell him yourself, Keena. We'll be there in a few days.”

* * *

For a long while, all Rolo knew was pain, and he woke to the same nightmare he'd left behind when he lost track of himself.

He knew, in retrospect, that it couldn’t have been long. A handful of ticks, probably, because none of the Galra had moved from where they’d been before. But knowing that didn’t make it feel any less like an eternity.

When he at last settled back into his body, he felt impossibly heavy. For those few seconds, he’d existed apart from his body, apart from time, apart from the universe itself. All there had been was darkness, an unintelligible voice in his head, and pain. No thoughts, no fears. The pain was gone now, but he was back in his body, and it was suffocating. He was drowning in open air, crushed beneath the weight of his bones.

He laughed, the sound rattling in his ears like broken glass. “Is that all you bastards got?”

Something crackled in the air beside his face, sending waves of warmth across his skin. “Careful, mongrel,” a voice hissed. “You know what happens when you get smart.”

“I win a prize?” Rolo asked. He winced at the druid pressed the tips of her claws to his collarbone, currents of liquid fire racing outward from the touch. These were not the only burns he’d suffered since he came here—how long ago was it now? He couldn’t tell. He’d spent most of the time strapped to a table, and the rest shut away in a cryopod (not, unfortunately, to heal; merely to sleep while the druids did their work.) He’d expected death, _begged_ for it, but still they kept him alive.

Alive, but not wholly in one piece. As the sensation of _being_ faded to the background, his pains made themselves known again: the sting of Quintessential burn across his scalp and chest, several deep cuts on his back where one of the guards had clawed him open when he tried to run, bruises covering most of his body. The prosthetic he’d built for himself out of spare parts was gone, and the thing they’d replaced it with felt like a metal rod had been welded to what was left of his leg. What a sight he must be.

Nyma always had said his bleeding heart would get him killed. At this point, Rolo wished she’d been right.

He sagged in his bonds, too weak to fight the pounding in his head as the experiment wound down. He didn’t know what they were doing to him, except that it hurt, and that it left him with patches of lost time, sometimes brief, sometimes longer than he could measure. The only person who spoke to him was the druid in charge of it all, and that only to give him orders or taunt him when he fought back. They did at least feed him (occasionally) and bring him water (never enough.) He supposed that meant they wanted him alive, for when he’d tried to refuse their oh-so-generous offerings, they’d shoved a tube down his throat and fed him anyway.

He didn’t refuse the food anymore.

“Was that the last of it?” the druid asked—not of Rolo, but of the researchers dotting the wall. Rolo hadn’t managed to get a very good look at any of them. He knew there were more than three, probably not more than a dozen, and that they all were Galra. Though he could have guessed that much by his accomodations.

After a moment, a voice Rolo didn’t recognize responded. “Yes, ma’am. Phase One is complete. It’ll take some time for us to process the data. Should we put him under?”

An uncontrollable shiver ran through Rolo. He’d never liked cryostasis all that much, and it was worse now that he had no control over it. He could only assume that so far they’d never left him under for more than a single night. But for all he knew, it could have been years. Nyma could already be dead, Beezer rusting away somewhere, forgotten and alone. The paladins could have fallen, the rest of the universe succumbed to Zarkon’s reign.

_Don’t put me under again._

The druid laughed, trailing her claws down Rolo’s face. “Well, now. It seems he’d rather stay awake.” She wore the featureless mask most druids wore, so Rolo couldn’t see her smile, but he could feel it in the way her fingers traced the shell of his ear. “That seems fitting. After all the trouble he’s given us, why let him sleep the pain away?”

“Ma’am… His wounds...”

“Wounds heal,” the druid said. “Take him to the cells where you store the rest of his generation. Make sure to let his cellmate know that we expect him to survive.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The druid swept from the room. Rolo’s fur stood on end where her touch had been. Tremors wracked his body, his breath coming in shallow gasps as the guards undid his restraints. His mind screamed at him to run, but it was all he could do not to collapse at his captors’ feet. His legs hadn’t held his weight in days, and after so long being held at an angle, standing upright set the whole world on a slant, so Rolo kept pitching forward whenever his escorts loosened their grip on him. And that damn peg leg wasn’t helping matters.

They dragged him out of the medical lab (medical torture chamber, more like) and down an unfamiliar corridor, Rolo hobbling one one mostly-good leg and one piss-poor excuse for a prosthetic all the way. He thought maybe this had been the way they’d brought him in, but he’d been delirious with pain at the time, and he hadn’t left the lab since. The farther they went, though, the less familiar the corridor looked. The modern crystal lamps switched over to ordinary lumps of raw crystal set into metal baskets on the wall, the sentries standing guard at every checkpoint were replaced with live soldiers, armed only with metal staffs. And the cell door, when they finally reached it, was opened with a simple key in an ordinary lock.

Rolo didn’t have long to wonder what sort of backwater prison world he’d landed himself on. The guards gave him a shove, and he landed hard on the cold stone floor of a cell.

“Decora wants him in good shape for Phase Two,” one of the guards said. “Patch him up, or she’ll take it out of your hide.”

The door slammed shut before the other prisoner could respond, the lock sliding home with a quaint little _snkt._ Rolo laughed, curling around his injured ribs. (He’d forgotten about that one—they’d cracked him hard with a baton when he’d mouthed off on his first day. Good to know he hadn’t been here long enough for it to heal.)

His cellmate scooted over, offering Rolo a drink from a bowl of warm, stale water. Rolo drank thirstily, though not with much relief. He was still thirsty, still aching, and he couldn’t sit upright without his cellmate’s help.

He was an old alien, his hair too patchy, too chalky to be mistaken for Galra. His hands shook as he took stock of Rolo’s wounds, and he muttered unfamiliar curses under his breath. “They really did a number on you, didn’t they, son?”

Rolo laughed, not least of all at the notion of anyone—a stranger most of all—calling him son. “Never did figure out how to keep my damn mouth shut. Joke's on them, though. I think they thought they’d break me if they just hit hard enough.” He broke off with a ragged gasp as cold, too-slick fingers found the open wounds on his back. “Ahh, _vrekt._ Sorry ‘bout this, old man.”

“Don’t apologize,” the alien said, turning to retrieve another bowl from the side of the room, along with a dirty scrap of cloth. Well, at least he had _something_ to use to try to keep Rolo alive. He wondered whether they’d really let him die, or if they’d drag him off to the cryopods before then, then beat this old alien for good measure. “This isn’t your fault.”

A smile tugged at Rolo’s lips as he closed his eyes, letting the aches rise around him like a tide. “Yeah… Kinda is, though. My fault I got captured. My fault I smart-mouthed the guards. My fault I had a bounty on my head in the first place, really. I coulda stayed where I was. Maybe I’d’ve ended up the one doling out wounds like these.”

The alien’s hands slowed, and Rolo waited for him to realize. That was the fate of mongrels, after all. Not good enough for the real Galra, too much like the enemy for everyone else.

But the alien just went back to cleaning Rolo’s wounds, his motions even more gentle than before. “I’ll have to see if I can convince them to give me bandages, maybe some kind of antibiotics. I don’t want these wounds getting infected.”

“Not your fault if they do,” Rolo pointed out.

The old man smiled. “I know. That doesn’t mean I want to watch you suffer.”

“Why do you care, anyway?”

“Because in here, we’ve only got each other.”

There was a certain amount of familiarity in the sentiment, and it brought a lump to Rolo’s throat. He thought of Nyma and Beezer, somewhere out there without him. He hoped they were getting along all right. “Where is _here_ , anyway?”

“I don’t know the name of it, but I know it’s a long way away from anything. Zarkon doesn’t want this place to be found.” Tepid water found the newest burns, and Rolo flinched away from the touch, screwing his eyes shut. “It’s okay, son. You’re okay. I’m sorry.”

“Stop apologizing.”

“Sure... I’ve only heard the name of the research project they’re carrying out here--Project Robeast.”

“Aw, _vrekt_.” Rolo leaned his temple against the cold floor, trying to quell his nausea. Cool air flowed across his scalp—they’d shaved it at some point; he hadn’t dreamed that after all—and he shuddered.

His cellmate rested a hand on his arm. “You’ve heard of it, then?”

“Enough to know I don’t want to be here.”

“You and me both.” They fell silent for a while, the old alien helping Rolo get comfortable, his aching head pillowed in the man’s lap. As Rolo was drifting toward a restless sleep, though, the alien spoke again. “You have a name, son?”

“Rolo,” he said. “You?”

“Sam,” the alien said. “Sam Holt. We're gonna get through this, Rolo. I swear, we're gonna make it through.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First and foremost, I want to thank Pechat for this _absolutely incredible_ art of [Allura and Meri](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com/post/162806216664/seamarmot-allura-from-voltron-with-meri-an-oc). I'm crying, they're so beautiful.
> 
> Second, _Voltron: Duality_ is coming up on one year old! I can't believe it's been a year already--and I can't believe this story has come so far from the little self-indulgent fic I started so long ago. If you've been looking for an excuse to talk to me about this story, or to share your thoughts/art/fic/playlists, now's the perfect time! You can @ tag me on Tumblr (@squirenonny), and I track the "voltron duality" tag. And of course, my askbox is always open, so don't be shy! :)
> 
> Finally, thank you all for reading, for commenting, for reccing this fic! You, my friends, are the best. I'm going to be taking a break between seasons to finish planning out season 3 (which is going to be MASSIVE, by the way. So get ready for that) and to work on some other projects.
> 
> "Kiss, Fake it Better" (Meri-centric side story featuring smol Lance) and "Dungeons & Dwarf Stars" (Meri GMs a Paranoia campaign for some of the paladins, other campaigns feature in later chapters) will be coming over the next few months.
> 
> My original fiction project, [Scops & Co](http://scopsandco.com) updates on the first of each month. There are two stories up so far, with more on the way. And if you head over to the website, you can sign up for the mailing list to get an email when each new chapter posts.
> 
> I'll also probably end up using Heith Week, Shatt Week, and Voltron WLW Month as warm-ups as I work on prepping for season 3 and revising a novel I wrote a little while back, so you'll probably see random other oneshots popping up on my profile over the next few weeks.
> 
> And then I'll be back sometime probably September/early October with the start of the as-yet-unnamed Season 3 of _Voltron: Duality_! In the meantime, catch updates and tidbits on my Tumblr, [@squirenonny](http://squirenonny.tumblr.com) and chat with me about Duality, or about the new season when it releases. Thanks for reading!


	30. Season 3 Preview

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 3, Shadows of Stars, is up now! [Go check it out,](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12231306/chapters/27787803) or read the first thousand words below.

Lance woke to the sound of rain hitting the window.

He sat upright in bed, pulse racing, and it took him a long while to figure out why his heart felt like it might beat out of his chest at any moment. _Rain._ How long had it been since he'd felt the rain? How long had it been since he'd been on a planet that even understood the concept?

Lance tossed his blankets off, cursing softly as his foot tangled in the sheet, then stood and carefully tiptoed over and around the other figures cluttering the living room floor. The last few days had been... hectic, to say the least. Between the refugees from Project Balmera—people who, like Val, had been stuffed full of crystals in the Galra Empire's attempt to engineer "renewable energy"—trying to get in contact with their families, the rest of the castle's crew looking for their first taste of Earth, and the fact that no one but the Mendozas had a house in Carlsbad, now that the Holt house was full of bullets and blood...

Yeah. It was a little bit crowded.

Lance didn't mind, though. He'd surrendered his bedroom to Hunk's moms, Eli had taken over Mateo's room, and Karen Holt took the last actual bed in Luz's room. Shiro and his brother were staying at Lance's aunt and uncle's house, along with Val and the Alteans. Everyone else—barring the handful of aliens who had opted to stay on the castle-ship, where they could be ready for a surprise attack from deep space—was gathered in the living room with Lance. Luz and Mateo slept one on either side of Lance's sleeping bag, Matt and Pidge huddled together by the stairs, and Hunk got the sofa by simple right of being the first one to fall asleep last night. No one had wanted to risk trampling him when they inevitably stayed up much later playing ridiculous games.

Lance crossed to the couch now, tapping Hunk's foot a few times until he startled awake and ran a hand down his face. "Lance? What time is it?"

"I'm not sure." Lance looked toward the kitchen, but he couldn't see the stove clock from this angle. By the weak gray light coming through the window, he guessed it was still early. "Doesn't matter. Listen."

Hunk cocked his head to the side, and Lance grinned as the rhythmic patter of raindrops filled the silence. His whole body felt lighter for the sound, his pulse quickening to keep pace.

All at once, Hunk shot upright, his mouth dropping open. "Lance--"

"I know!"

"Are you gonna--?"

"Obviously. You want to come? You don't have to."

But Hunk was already on his feet. They tiptoed together to the front door, Lance clutching at Hunk's sleeve to supplement the lip-biting he was already doing to keep from squealing out loud.

_Rain._

"Holy quiznak," Lance whispered once he had a pair of sandals on and finally opened the front door. Hunk glanced backward, probably looking to see whether they'd roused anyone else in their excitement, but Lance couldn't bring himself to care right now. They'd been on Earth for just over a week now, and Lance had spent most of that time with his family, telling them an abbreviated version of his story—and leaving out the worst bits. They'd been worried enough once they realized he was fighting a literal war; they didn't need to know about the zombies and the pissing Haggar off and the part where he sent Wyn off to safety in Blue, fully expecting it to get Lance himself killed.

Well. It had been a long week. Longer for some people, considering all the business with the UN. Lance's attention last night had been split between a board game Mateo wanted to teach him, an argument with Pidge over what counted as a humanoid alien, really, and trying to keep track of Karen's conversation with the other adults. He gathered that she and Allura and Shiro had finally reached some sort of conclusion with the UN and most of its member nations, though. Which was good. They'd had pizza and marathoned Star Wars to celebrate—though it had only made Lance want to watch it with the aliens.

Meri had seen it, hadn’t she? Lance couldn’t remember, but she'd lived on Earth for twelve years. She'd probably watched all the sci fi just to make fun of it. Lance knew that was what he would do if he ever got stranded on a planet a couple dozen iPhone generations behind.

So there were a lot of reasons the last week had passed in an almost dream-like state. Lance was _home_ , and he knew he was home, and he'd burst into tears on more than one occasion when it hit him that he had his family back. But so much of it had felt surreal that on some level, he supposed, he kept expecting to wake up and find he'd imagined it all.

Stepping out into the rain, though... That he knew was real. He'd dreamed about rain more than once since leaving home, he'd been to planets that had something like mist or snow filling the air, but none of it had felt right. None of it was like _this._

Lance tilted his head back, letting the rain wash over him. The twilight smelled of wet grass and clean air, and Lance couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled out of him. He blinked furiously, trying to stare up into the drizzle.

“Hunk,” he said, hearing the splash of footsteps joining him on the driveway. “We made it.”

Hunk leaned over, pressing their shoulders together. He’d stopped long enough to grab a raincoat from the front closet and slip on a pair of shoes—both of which were probably smart choices. It wasn’t exactly frigid out here, but it was November, and it was about four in the morning, and the rain _was_ cold.

Lance didn’t care.

He kicked off his sandals and wriggled his toes in a puddle, relishing the cool silk feel of it against his skin. _God,_ he’d missed this.

He hesitated a moment longer, then grabbed Hunk and towed him away from the house. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a park at the end of the block that has _awesome_ puddles.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Fanart for Voltron: Duality](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12548560) by [niyalune](https://archiveofourown.org/users/niyalune/pseuds/niyalune)




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